The Making of John B. Gough

The Making of John B. Gough (1817-1886):
Temperance Celebrity, Evangelical Pageantry, and the Conservatism
of Popular Reform in Victorian Society
Xi Chen
A dissertation
submitted in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
University of Washington
2013
Reading Committee:
William J. Rorabaugh, Chair
Richard Johnson
R. Kent Guy
Program Authorized to Offer Degree:
History
@Copyright 2013
Xi Chen
University of Washington
Abstract
The Making of John B. Gough (1817-1886):
Temperance Celebrity, Evangelical Pageantry, and the Conservatism
of Popular Reform in Victorian Society
Xi Chen
Chair of the Supervisory Committee:
Dr. William J. Rorabaugh
History Department
The dissertation is partly a biography of John Bartholomew Gough, a transatlantic
temperance celebrity and one of the most popular itinerant lecturers of the Victorian era. It is
also a social history of Gough’s supporters and opponents, an intellectual history of the friction
he incited between the temperance and prohibition factions, and a cultural history of the
paradoxes inherent in the popularization of evangelical temperance reform.
By focusing on the controversies surrounding Gough and through analysis of newspapers,
pamphlets, memoirs, and private diaries and correspondence, the dissertation reconstructs the
deepening socioeconomic and ideological fault lines that came to define the temperance
movement in the mid-19th century. It re-evaluates the connections between evangelical
temperance and radical reform issues, such as abolition and women’s rights. It argues that
Gough’s rise to stardom was intertwined with the coming-of-age of the conservative evangelical
mercantile class, and that the evangelical temperance ethos he championed became popular, as it
iii
was being diluted and commodified as a marker of social respectability and detached from social
and political action. The dissertation examines closely the ideological origins of the evangelical
retreat from legislative prohibition in the late 1850s and illuminates, through Gough’s
involvement, the transatlantic reverberations of the collapse of the alliance for prohibition.
The dissertation also studies Gough as a cultural phenomenon. It investigates how and
why Gough’s clerical supporters tried to defend and justify his dramatic lectures while
denouncing the theater. Drawing connections between the popular lecturer and the evangelical
preacher, the dissertation suggests that the clergy’s formulation of Gough’s “anti-theatrical
drama” and their obsessive defense of his authenticity signified an ambivalent acceptance of
Realist theater and a deep-seated moral anxiety created by the tensions between the Puritan
legacy and the new liberal theology. By tracing the (auto)biographical remaking of Gough’s
public image and his influence in the elocution movement after 1860, the dissertation examines
the Christianization and domestication of the self-made man, the tensions between authenticity
and refinement in the new elocutionary “science,” and the merging of Gough and his brand of
temperance advocacy into moral entertainment and the Victorian mainstream.
iv
Table of Contents
Introduction.
The Making of a Temperance Celebrity………………………………………….1
Chapter I.
The Apostasy of the Apostle: The Social History of Gough’s New York Scandal, 18451846………………………………………………………………………...........17
Chapter II.
“St. Bartholomew” on Trial: Gough v. Lees (1858) and the Transatlantic Temperance
Schism……………………………………………………………………………79
Chapter III.
The Paradox of the Anti-Theatrical Drama: Dramatic Lecturing Defended and
Justified………………………………………………………………………….122
Chapter IV.
The Cult of John B. Gough: From Temperance to Moral Entertainment………..151
Conclusion.
John B. Gough, the Man, the Lecturer, and the Victorian………………………..195
Appendix I.
The Forgotten Reformers…………………………………………………………200
Appendix II.
Friends and Foes, 1845-46………………………………………………………..205
Bibliography……………………………………………………………………….211
i
Figures
Fig. 1. Procession of the London Temperance League in Honor of Gough…………..80
Fig. 2. Temperance Pavilion at Dunse………………………………………………..148
Fig. 3. Gough at Sadler’s Wells……………………………………………………… 149
Chart. 1. Gough’s Average Earnings………………………………………………….166
Fig. 4. Frontispiece showing “temperance, industry, education, and wealth”………...167
Fig. 5. Beauty and the Beer……………………………………………………………181
Fig. 6. Helen Potter as Gough………………………………………………………….188
Chart. 2. Google Ngram Search with “John B. Gough”……………………………......192
vi
For Zhu Hong
Acknowledgements
The dissertation feels like a start rather than a finish. The moment I thought it completed,
I began to realize how much more can still be done. I could not have come so far, though,
without the help and emotional support of those who kept me company along the way. Steve
Nissenbaum inspired me to become a historian. He and Dona Brown have imparted in me a
passion for New England history and have given me their friendship and love. Bill Rorabaugh
has overseen this project from its inception and he has been there for me every step of the way. I
cannot thank him enough. Kent Guy, Richard Johnson, and Yomi Braester offered
encouragement and valuable advice for revision in the final phase of the writing. I wish I had
time to implement all the changes they suggested. I am indebted to the American Antiquarian
Society and its staff, who provided me with a research fellowship and the best research
assistance I’ve ever known. I am grateful to the research librarians and archivists who have
helped me track down Gough’s correspondence, especially those who rendered their services for
free, including Nan Card at the R. B. Hays Presidential Center, Olga Tsapina at the Huntington
Library, and Bill Dupuis at the Boylston Historical Society. To my wife and partner, whose hard
work has made my prolonged education possible and who has given me a life beyond academia,
I owe too much. This dissertation is for her.
vii
Frontispiece: John. B. Gough. Steel-plate engraving in Platform Echoes (1886) from a
life size painting by Sir Daniel Macnee, R.S.A., presented to Mrs. Gough, May 22, 1855.
INTRODUCTION
The Making of a Temperance Celebrity
The dissertation examines the controversial life and career of John Bartholomew Gough (18171886), a drunkard turned teetotal lecturer who transformed and dominated the temperance
platform on both sides of the Atlantic in the mid to late 19th century. Gough was to the platform
what Rev. Henry Ward Beecher was to the pulpit, though the boundary between the two
professions was becoming increasingly porous in their lifetimes. 1 Gough violated every norm of
stately oratory, and yet he mesmerized a new generation and a new social class of audiences with
his pathos and humor. He redefined the relationship between the speaker and his audience and
avoided formal logic and high-toned declamation in favor of mimicry, anecdotal illustration, and
cathartic commiseration. He injected theatre and commercialism into the temperance reform, as
Beecher did in the evangelical pulpit, and he had been the first to make a living and a great
fortune by temperance lecturing alone, a source of contention for much of his public life. 2
This is a biography of a limited scope. It focuses on selective episodes and aspects of
Gough’s career and relies mainly on published sources. As there is little reliable evidence to
indicate that Gough had a private self independent from his public persona, this study is an
1
On Henry Ward Beecher, see the Pulitzer Prize biography by Debby Applegate, The Most
Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher (New York, 2006) and a more
interpretative work by William G. McLoughlin, The Meaning of Henry Ward Beecher: An Essay
on the Shifting Values of Mid-Victorian America, 1840-1870 (New York, 1970).
2
The resemblance does not end here, either. Both Gough’s and Beecher’s public careers were
tarnished by high-profile scandals and widely-publicized court trials, and perhaps not
surprisingly, they defended each other in times of trouble.
1
attempt to understand the temperance celebrity from the outside in, rather than from the inside
out. 3
With its selective focus, the dissertation takes aim at broader social and cultural issues,
which Gough illuminated by virtue of his popularity and his controversies. His rise to
temperance stardom was intertwined with the coming-of-age of the evangelical middle class and
with their business acumen and conservative social agenda. He had come to embody not only the
evangelical temperance movement but also the hopes and fears of his evangelical followers. In
this light, the dissertation is also a study of the particular social class that constituted the
mainstay of Gough’s fame, and it is a re-evaluation of the evangelical temperance movement, not
at its radical fringes, but at its conservative core.
This dissertation is also transnational in scope, as Gough’s popular support was not
confined to a single region or nation. He made his name in the U.S., but he went on extended
tours in Britain and its Canadian provinces. Though he had never visited Australia or New
Zealand in person, his lectures (delivered by imitators) were received there with popular acclaim.
Gough was a key figure in the international evangelical temperance alliance. This dissertation
explores through him the close-knit network and the shared ideological and social agenda of
conservative evangelicals in the English-speaking world.
Gough has been the bearer more often than the center of my story. The narrative of his
life, as was laid out, rehashed, and fictionalized in numerous biographical accounts, does not
need an extended retelling here; moreover, according to his devotees, nobody could tell a story
better than he did. Rather, I have zoomed in on the stories that Gough neglected to tell, stories
3
There is little in Gough’s manuscripts at the American Antiquarian Society to illuminate his
inner thoughts. He often had his wife write and answer his letters, and these letters were more
often than not business-like. His personal diaries were evidently composed for the public eye and
were often used as an alibi against the accusers of his inconsistencies.
2
that would shed light on the changing social and cultural fabrics of social reform and on those
who endorsed Gough by their presence on the platform and those who flocked to hear him. I
have bypassed biographical details in order to focus on those episodes and aspects of Gough’s
career that either produced broader social impacts or resonated with popular thought and culture.
I have employed a variety of historical methods and sometimes an interdisciplinary approach as
dictated by the subject and by the nature of the sources. The final product, therefore, is
necessarily a collection of disparate elements, of social, intellectual, theater, and book histories,
which are connected by Gough’s presence and involvement in the critical junctures of the
temperance movement and in popular culture, rather than by a continuous biographical thread.
A recap of Gough’s early life and adventures before he turned a temperance lecturer will
be necessary, however, in order for us to better understand Gough and the more salient episodes
and aspects of his public career. 4 Here, we have little to rely on except Gough’s own story. His
life as told by himself was a quintessential tale of the American self-made man. Born in 1817 in
the small seaside village of Sandgate in Kent, England, John Bartholomew Gough was the son of
a foot soldier who had served in the British Army in the Napoleonic wars. Barely able to provide
for his family on his meager pension, Gough’s father apprenticed him at the age of twelve to
David Mannering, a neighbor and fellow member of the Methodist Society, who was about to
emigrate to the United States. Gough arrived in the New York harbor with the Mannerings in
August 1829 on the ship Helen. They traveled up the Hudson River and then on the Erie Canal,
4
The following story is based mostly on Gough’s autobiographies, published first in 1845 and
then revamped in 1869, and partly on the few vital records I found about him. John B. Gough, An
Autobiography (Boston, 1845); Autobiography and Personal Recollections of John B. Gough
(Springfield, MA; Chicago; Philadelphia, 1869).
3
and finally reached a farm in the village of Westmoreland near Utica. 5 The boom towns and
villages along the newly opened canal were then abuzz with commercial activities and with news
of religious awakenings. Gough had landed in the heart of the so-called “burned-over district,”
the vast Western New York hinterland gripped by a groundswell of evangelical fervor. Gough
soon got religion himself at a camp-meeting and became a member of the Methodist Society on
probation.
But Gough was not happy with his life on the farm. Like many an apprentice of his time,
he longed for the excitement of the city and a life of independence, and he resented being used as
a farm hand and not being taught a trade. 6 Having spent two and a half years with the
Mannerings, he left for New York City in December 1831, before his term of service was up. In
his autobiography, Gough explained that he had written to his father and obtained his permission
to strike out on his own. While it is unclear under what circumstances he took leave of the
Mannerings, his early life and quarrels with them would become a sticking point later in his
public career, especially after he converted to Congregationalism and began to speak ill of the
family in his lectures.
Using his Methodist connections, Gough landed a job in New York City as an errand boy
at the Methodist Book Concern (the publishing house of the Methodist Society) and he learned
the trade of book binding. He boarded with Methodists, earned his keep from the Society, and
joined the Methodist Church in Allen Street. According to his autobiography, his church was
even going to sponsor him for a college education, until some “circumstances,” which Gough
5
The Mannerings’ move was by no means random but was already mapped out by previous
immigrants from Kent and fellow members of the Methodist Society.
6
Historian Bill Rorabaugh traces the collapse of the craft apprenticeship system in the early to
mid 19th century. See Rorabaugh, The Craft Apprentice: From Franklin to the Machine Age in
America (New York, 1986).
4
never explained, forced his separation from the church and the Book Concern. It was then,
according to him, that he first became “exposed to temptation.” 7
Gough’s progress down the road of dissipation was temporarily arrested, however, by the
arrival of his mother and sister from England in August 1833. 8 But he and his sister had to bury
their mother the next summer in the potter’s field, a graveyard for paupers and condemned
criminals, which scene Gough immortalized in his autobiography and lectures. He soon became
separated from his sister, who moved off for work. At the age of seventeen, he was on his own
again.
This was, according to Gough, when his downward spiral began in earnest. Without a
family or a church, he sought company among other rootless and churchless young journeymen
in the city. He joined a fire engine company and a workingmen’s dramatic society. Having
overcome his early scruples about the theater, he frequented the Bowery (a workingmen’s theater)
and became a singer of comic songs at the Franklin Theater in Chatham Street.9 Drinking was
then part of the workingmen’s life and Gough drank freely. He was one of the rowdy young
workmen who haunted the streets and taverns of lower Manhattan in the 1830s, anticipating the
stock character of the soap-locked 10 Bowery Boys of the 1840s. From his arrival in late 1831 to
his departure for Bristol, RI in early 1836, Gough had spent at least four years in the city and he
knew the city inside out, including its popular and shady haunts.
7
Gough, Autobiography and Personal Recollections, 67.
8
His father did not visit until 1847 and returned to England in 1850.
9
Gough, Autobiography and Personal Recollections, 80-81. Chatham Street is, incidentally,
where Gough would allegedly take the fateful cup of doctored soda water in 1845.
10
A distinctive hair style of the Boys with locks of hair curled and then soaped to plaster it down
against the cheek.
5
Gough’s life between 1836 and October 1842 was characterized by habitual drunkenness
and roaming between jobs, including stints in a travelling diorama company and on a fishing
boat, a life which Gough would later describe as resulting from his dissipation, but which, in
hindsight, was shaped to a larger extent by the uncertain economic times in the wake of the Panic
of 1837. Gough married Mary Cheney, the sister of a fisherman and a Methodist, in Newbury,
MA in 1838, and later they moved to Worcester, MA. On May 20, 1842, his wife died, according
to Gough, due to his drunken neglect, along with a newborn infant. 11 Gough was again left alone
and continued his binges until one day in October, when a waiter at a temperance hotel in
Worcester and member of the local Washingtonian Total Abstinence Society, named Joel
Stratton, tapped him on the shoulder and kindly invited him to a Washingtonian meeting.
The Washingtonians, as the voluntary teetotal society of erstwhile drunkards came to be
known, had been growing rapidly in Worcester and in other towns and cities in the United States.
The movement originated in Baltimore in 1840, and started as a workingmen self-help and
mutual aid society. Steeped in the influence of the low-church culture, it featured rambunctious
experience meetings and public rituals of pledge signing and renewal, and the Washingtonians
resisted any form of coercion in reform, for drunkards or liquor sellers. Gough was welcomed
into the community of his peers, and his talent as a public speaker and actor was soon discovered.
He was asked to stump for the Washingtonians in the surrounding towns and hamlets in
Worcester County.
11
Digitized records of John B. Gough and Mary B. Cheney’s marriage (Nov. 1, 1838, Newbury,
MA) and Mary Cheney Gough’s death (May 20, 1842) can be found at Ancestry.com. Accessed
Sept. 1, 2010. Mary Cheney may have died in labor, as it was recorded that she died “w. John B.,
May 20, 1842.” In the autobiography, Gough did not mention his having had or expecting a baby
until it died. See Gough, An Autobiography, 52.
6
Barely five months after signing his pledge, Gough had a relapse. Backsliding was
common among the Washingtonians and those who repented were invariably welcomed back
into the fold after re-signing the pledge. In retrospect, however, the details of Gough’s first
relapse in April 1843 are worth noting, as they foreshadowed the scandal that was to befall him
in September 1845. On April 7, 1843, citing a headache caused by an early childhood injury to
the head, Gough took the train for Boston, where few yet knew him as a temperance speaker. He
ran into some old workingmen friends and went on a drinking spree lasting a week, including
visiting the theater and the oyster saloon. In the meantime, he had enough of a “dry” spell to
speak for a temperance society (twice) in Newburyport. 12 On his return to Worcester, he made a
confession to his friends and was readmitted into the society upon re-signing the pledge.
Recalling his first relapse in his autobiography in 1845, Gough attributed his fall to the
over-reliance on man and the absence of God in his Washingtonian reformation. By then, he had
begun to speak for new audiences and new patrons – indeed, part of the moral lesson drawn from
the relapse was for the reformed to “abandon their old associates and not place themselves in the
way of temptation.” 13 A few months after his first relapse and re-signing, Gough befriended one
of the most important sponsors in his early career as a temperance speaker, a retired paper and
upholstery dealer and a deep-pocketed philanthropist in Boston named Moses Grant. It was
through Grant and his network that Gough was first introduced to metropolitan audiences, or
rather, to the New England evangelical enclaves in the coastal cities of Boston, New York,
12
See Gough, Autobiography and Personal Recollections, 147-151.
13
Gough, An Autobiography, 83-4.
7
Philadelphia, and Baltimore. Gough started to acquire a wider fame and he made a point of
distancing himself from the Washingtonians. 14
From 1843 to 1845, Gough re-reformed himself by marrying a devout New England
woman, Mary Whitcomb of Berlin, MA, and by joining the evangelical Congregational Church
of Rev. Edward Norris Kirk in Roxbury. Under Moses Grant’s management, he started charging
admission at the door for giving his experiences, now labeled as “lectures.” He turned his back
on the Washingtonian anti-coercionist principle of moral suasion for all, and advocated, along
the lines of his new patrons, prohibitory law for the drink makers and sellers. 15
The world, for Gough, was always full of enemies, even though he was never short of
“friends.” In early 1845, Rev. Jesse Pound of the St. Matthews Methodist Episcopal Church in
New York City accused Gough in public of slandering David Mannering, his former master. 16
Though the quarrel started with personal insults Gough uttered against the Mannerings in his
lectures, it may not be altogether far-fetched to suggest that it had something to do with Gough’s
betrayal of the Methodist community, on whom he used to depend for survival, by converting to
14
More about Moses Grant and his management of Gough’s lectures will be discussed in Ch. I.
15
The Washingtonians themselves split into two opposing camps (as was the case in Worcester),
a result of the fast growth of the movement, which had drawn in more than manual workers, but
also clerks and professionals who wanted to control and reshape the movement with clerical
support. Worcester became home to two competing Washingtonian societies in 1844, each
publishing their own paper: the pro-legal-suasion clerics-approved Massachusetts Cataract and
Worcester County Waterfall (which Gough sided with) and the moral-suasion-only pro-labor
Worcester Reformer and True Washingtonian. Further evidence of the split can be found in Sean
Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 17881850 (1984; 2nd ed., New York, 1986), 306-14.
16
See Jesse D. Pound, ed., The Echo of truth to the Voice of Slander; or John B. Gough’s Early
History (New York, 1845). Pound was also an immigrant from Kent, England.
8
Congregationalism the previous year. 17 This, however, proved to be the least of his troubles in
1845.
Barely out of the woods, Gough landed in a bigger controversy on a visit to New York in
September 1845. Knowing the city well from experience, he allegedly walked unaware into a
trap set for him by the Boston rum-sellers, causing a nationally known scandal that was to shake
the temperance world and reshuffle the alignment of various social forces engaged in the
temperance reform. Chapter I provides a social and cultural analysis of the scandal. It traces how
the scandal played out in the print media, churches, and lecture halls, and examines the class,
gender, and denominational profile of Gough’s supporters and opponents. I argue that Gough’s
scandal brought about a broader social and cultural confrontation, a confrontation that polarized
the temperance community and helped consolidate the evangelical middle class. I suggest further
that this tight-knit evangelical temperance community, who reinstated Gough against great odds
and pushed him to greater heights of fame, did not serve as the incubator for radical abolitionists
or feminists; rather, the scandal exposed the fundamentally conservative nature of the
evangelically-inspired moral reform, which had shaped Gough’s agenda and the Victorian
mainstream.
Chapter II shifts the story to Great Britain. On July 20, 1853, Gough found himself on
board the steamer America bound for Liverpool. This was more than a homecoming trip for him;
17
Rev. Pound used to be a circuit rider in Onondaga Ct. and knew the Mannerings personally,
being an immigrant himself from Kent, England. Rev. John D. Torry, a Methodist preacher, who
was also involved in the controversy, had married the Mannerings’ daughter. The Methodist
Church itself was divided in the mid-1840s on the issue of teetotalism and Communion wine.
Rev. Pound was for moderation and using alcoholic wine in church service. See Pound, ed., Echo,
4 and Ian R. Tyrrell, Sobering Up: From Temperance to Prohibition in Antebellum America,
1800-1860 (Westport, CT; London, 1979), 56-58.
9
he was to test his lecturing skills on the “more sophisticated” English and Scottish audiences. 18
From what we know, Gough’s tour was a success beyond his wildest imagination and it
catapulted him into the rank of international celebrities. 19 Hoping to repeat his success while
pocketing £2,000 per annum (approx. $190,000 today), Gough sailed for Britain for a second
time in June 1857. His second tour was, however, clouded from the beginning by a long-drawnout controversy spanning both sides of the Atlantic, which he triggered personally by making an
about-face on the issue of legal prohibition and kept up by taking a fellow temperance advocate,
Frederic Richard Lees, to court for libel in London in June 1858. Chapter II looks into the
intellectual history and the factional politics of moral suasion versus legislative prohibition
behind the personal rivalry of Gough and Lees. It investigates why Gough had suddenly
returned to the anti-coercionist “moral-suasion-only” position of the Washingtonians in 1857. I
trace Gough’s change of mind to his patrons and to the upsurge of intellectual challenges posed
by the London literary circle in reaction to radical prohibitionism, which had been instituted as
state-wide liquor bans (known as the “Maine Law”) in the U.S. North from 1851 to 1855. I argue
that 1856-58 had seen a general retreat of the British Non-Conformist evangelicals (Gough’s
patrons) from political action under the pressure of respectable opinion; and that a similar change
took place concurrently in the United States, accompanied by socially conservative urban
revivals. Gough not only gave voice to the new conservative agenda of privatized reform based
on personal and familial piety but the controversy surrounding his libel trial in London provided
18
Gough, Autobiography and Personal Recollections, 281.
19
Historian Brian Harrison credited him with rejuvenating the temperance movement in Britain.
See Harrison, Drink and the Victorians: The Temperance Question in England, 1815-1872
(London, 1971), 145, 232, 370.
10
clues showing how the British temperance factionalism was transmitted to the American
movement.
Gough’s platform performance, which had won him an enormous following, forms the
subject of Chapter III. Delving into theater studies, this chapter not only identifies the theatrical
elements in Gough’s unique style of oratory based on contemporary reviews, but it treats
theatricality as a loaded issue and a source of public debate in Gough’s own time. Gough’s
dramatic oratory was touted in the press overwhelmingly by ministers-cum-reviewers at the same
time when the mainline American Protestant churches were beginning to embrace liberal (antiCalvinist) theology and populist homiletics. The chapter draws the connections between the
popular lecturer and the evangelical preacher and theologian, and analyzes how and why
Gough’s clerical supporters had tried to defend Gough’s dramatic lectures while denouncing the
theater and how they addressed the uneasy balance between sincerity and display.
In 1860, on his return from the stormy tour in Britain, Gough embarked on a new type of
lecturing, one that was not restricted to temperance advocacy and was largely made up of
humorous and strange incidents culled from his overseas travels. He transformed his public
image accordingly, from a reformed drunkard and a temperance crusader into a moral entertainer
and Christian self-made man. With a less obtrusive agenda, he managed to have a broader appeal
and win wider acclaim. His death in 1886 (of a stroke suffered while lecturing in Philadelphia at
age 69) did not put an end to his fame, either. Gough lived on in hagiographies and elocution
textbooks all the way to the early 1930s; his lectures were recited and re-performed in the
farthest corner of the English-speaking world; and his books were translated and published in
different languages. 20 The final chapter is essentially a history of the book that traces the
20
Including Welsh, German, French, Swedish, Finnish, and Sinhalese.
11
remaking of Gough’s public image in print after 1860 – both by himself and by others during and
beyond his lifetime. It seeks to explain the cultural forces and players that had shaped the public
memories about him and the sudden demise of his fame after 1930.
Quite a few modern scholars have written about Gough before me. John W. Crowley
explores the “subtle” connections between the drunkard’s narrative and that of the ex-slaves by a
comparative study of the autobiographies of Gough and Frederick Douglass 21 ; Thomas August
highlights the challenges the emerging oral and ritual-based narrative of the Washingtonians
posed to the elite and clerical discourse ensconced in print, using Gough’s autobiography as a
case in point 22 ; Graham Warder studies the commercialization of temperance reform, treating
Gough’s scandal and his “experiences” in general as commodities for sale in the cultural
marketplace of leisure 23 ; Amy Hughes focuses on Gough’s performance of delirium tremens as
theater and as a Barnumesque “freak” show, as does Warder 24 ; Tom Wright looks into Gough’s
shift from a temperance advocate into something of a cultural ambassador during the American
Civil War and argues for his role in strengthening the transatlantic rapport between the British
and the Anglo-Americans of the northern states 25 ; Katherine Chavigny, in her study of the
historical origins of the modern addiction confession and the therapeutic mentality, explores the
21
John W. Crowley, “Slave to the Bottle: Gough’s Autobiography and Douglass’s Narrative,” in
Debra J. Rosenthal and David S. Reynolds, eds., The Serpent in the Cup: Temperance in
American Literature (Amherst, MA, 1997).
22
Thomas Augst, “Temperance, Mass Culture, and the Romance of Experience,” American
Literary History 19:2 (Summer, 2007), 297-323.
23
Graham Warder, “Selling Sobriety: How Temperance Reshaped Culture in Antebellum
America” (Ph.D. diss., University of Massachusetts, 2000).
24
Amy Hughes, Spectacles of Reform: Theater and Activism in Nineteenth-Century America
(Ann Arbor, 2012).
25
Thomas F. Wright, “Britain on the American Popular Lecture Circuit, 1844-1865” (Ph.D. diss.,
University of Cambridge, 2010).
12
Washingtonian confessional literature and how Gough adapted it, using “self-exposure” and
“self-transformation” to win favor with the Victorian public 26 ; and Sara First has examined
Gough’s career in the context of the emergence of a “celebrity culture” and the birth of
celebrities in the 19th century. 27
These works have all, directly or indirectly, informed different aspects of my dissertation,
and they show the growing interest of scholars in Gough and in the popular discourse and
spectacle of moral reform over the last two decades. My focus on Gough, however, has allowed
me to dig deeper than anyone else into his papers and to go beyond discourse and performance
analyses. I have chosen the particular episodes and aspects of Gough’s career for this study
because they present unique opportunities to contextualize Gough socially, culturally, and
ideologically. I have examined Gough’s popular appeal in terms of the socioeconomics of the
evangelical temperance movement and the social and political agenda of his patrons and
audiences; I have mined newspapers, pamphlets, memoirs, and private diaries and letters for
reviews and comments about him or his lectures and have probed the divergent public reactions
to his controversies. Though this dissertation is by no means a complete life and times of John B.
Gough, it promises a historically accurate assessment of his place and his influence amidst a
sizable segment of the transatlantic Victorian society.
It is surprising, after so much has been written about Gough, that he still remains more or
less an obscure figure in our scholarly discourse on the American 19th century, and even in the
modern historical accounts of the temperance movement. John W. Crowley suggests that it is
26
Katherine A. Chavigny, “American Confessions: Reformed Drunkards and the Origins of the
Therapeutic Culture” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1999).
27
Sara B. First, “The Mechanics of Renown; Or, the Rise of a Celebrity Culture in Early
America” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 2009).
13
largely because Gough had refused to associate himself with the anti-slavery movement (or, for
that matter, women’s suffrage or Prohibition). Gough appears to be no hero to modern
Americans, who have long conquered their fear of alcohol, if not alcoholism itself; and they have
done this, oddly, by taking Gough’s advice of individualizing and medicalizing the drink
problem, hence sidelining the issue. Gough is not taken seriously also because of his ambiguous
moral record, and he has been ranked with P. T. Barnum as a showman par excellence. But the
discomforting truth is that though Gough was a polarizing figure, he was seen during his lifetime
and for more than four decades after his death as a moral and cultural hero by a large number of
middle-class men and women in the English-speaking world, and as far as I know, he was rarely
classed with Barnum (except by his enemies) but more often with famous preachers, reformers,
and orators, respected public men like Beecher, Wendell Phillips, and William Lloyd Garrison.28
In our selective memory of the past and celebration of the present, we tend to imagine that
history belongs to the abolitionists, feminists, and other radical reformers; we forget that there
were those and perhaps a majority of ordinary men and women, who viewed the “ultras” with
suspicion and distaste and who felt comfortable in sponsoring or paying lip service to
“conservative” (i.e. to conserve and promote social harmony) reform. They have somehow
become the elephant in the room in our recent scholarly dialogues.
It would be unwise for us to laugh at Gough as a hypocrite and leave it at that. He was
very much part of the Victorian popular culture and the mass market of the moral entertainment
industry. He played his part well and shrewdly. Before the age of radio and television, he
managed to project images and deliver messages through public speaking as well as the print
28
According to James B. Pond, owner and manager of a reputable commercial lyceum bureau,
Gough ranked with Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison as one of “the triumvirate of
lecture kings.” Pond, Eccentricities of Genius: Memoirs of Famous Men and Women of the
Platform and Stage (New York, 1900).
14
media, which appealed to a particular and sizable segment of the Victorian society. His hardcore
“fans” would not have thought of him as an actor or a hypocrite. They paid the admission of 25
to 75 cents in the U.S. or 1s to 2s 6d in the U.K. to hear a Gough lecture as willingly as we do
$50 to $300 today to attend a rock concert. It gave them an experience of communion with likeminded people, the nostalgia of being part of a community in an atomized society; it was like a
camp-meeting without the peer or clerical pressure for dramatic changes in one’s life. After all,
all that the lecturer demanded from his respectable audience was a spontaneous outflow of
sentiments and the little ritual sacrifice of removing wine from the dinner table.
Gough and the evangelical temperance movement in the mid to late Victorian era
symbolized the conundrum for a minority movement and ethos that had entered into the
mainstream. In the late 1820s and early 1830s, it took a major spiritual transformation and
personal courage to embrace teetotalism, which often signified an overall abstemiousness that
encompassed a constellation of issues including diet and sexuality. Teetotalism had been part of
the revolt against the ethos of consumption in an expanding capitalist marketplace. 29 But during
its popularization in the 1840s and 1850s, it became singled out and externalized as a marker of
middle-class respectability. It became detached from its origins in self-control, self-perfection,
and anti-consumption, and in a diluted and curtailed form, it had itself become an item of
consumption through popular speakers like Gough. The popular temperance movement gave
Gough and his patrons a sense of complacency and self-righteousness, not to mention personal
wealth, and it had also become a convenient excuse for their apathy toward radical reforms that
would have upset the social order. This dissertation aims to re-evaluate the evangelical
29
See, in the case of Sylvester Graham, Stephen Nissenbaum, Sex, Diet, and Debility in
Jacksonian America: Sylvester Graham and Health Reform (Chicago, 1980), xi.
15
temperance movement and to advance a more sober assessment of popular reform in the
Victorian era.
16
CHAPTER ONE
The Apostasy of the Apostle:
The Social History of Gough’s New York Scandal, 1845-46
“Beware! Ye guardians of public morals! We know your faults, and if ever we should
engage an artist to paint them in their true colors, you’ll start back affrighted at your own
pictures!”
George Washington Dixon 30
The Fall of the Apostle
Mr. John B. Gough, the “new apostle of temperance,” arrived in New York City unannounced on
Friday evening, September 5, 1845. 31 On his previous visits, he had taken the city by storm with
his heartrending pleas for the drunkard and his eloquent testimony of the power of the total
abstinence pledge. He was not to speak here this time, however, but as he later explained to see
friends and to arrange for his winter schedule. He checked in at the Croton Hotel, one of the
finest temperance establishments in the city, took afternoon tea, and went out, at around half past
seven, for a leisurely stroll on Broadway. His appearance was a far cry from fourteen years
earlier (late 1831), when he first arrived in the city with fifty cents in his pocket and a small
trunk over his shoulder. Now in his late 20s, he had the looks of a gentleman. He wore a black
dress coat and pantaloons, a black satin vest, a fashionable hat (Le Gay), and newly-footed
Boston boots. He carried a gold watch and $230 in his pocket. 32 Nothing about him would have
betrayed his humble origin in this anonymous city. He purchased a watch-guard, stopped at the
Saxton & Miles bookstore (probably to check on the sales of his popular autobiography), and
30
Cited in Dale Cockrell, Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World
(Cambridge, U.K.; New York, 1997), 107.
31
“Great Mass Temperance Meeting at Faneuil Hall – Mr. Gough, the Distinguished
Washingtonian,” Boston Daily Mail, n.d., in News Clippings Folio Vol. 1 (1843-1845), Gough
Papers (American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, MA).
32
New York Herald, Sept. 14, 1845.
17
was reported last seen looking at prints next door in front of William A. Colman’s bookstore. 33 34
Then he went missing. 35
The public did not know about Gough’s disappearance until the next Friday after his
friends tried and finally failed to locate him. Public notices were then posted around the city and
printed in every newspaper, and a substantial cash reward was promised for his recovery.
Gough’s friends suspected “accident or foul play.” Rumor spread of his murder and his body
found in the East River. The New York Courier and Enquirer suggested that Gough might have
ventured into the Five Points (New York’s red-light district) “in search of materials and incidents
for his lectures,” and that he had “met with ill treatment at the hands of some of the ruffians who
infest those places.” Everyone seemed to be holding their breath for a horror of gothic
proportions. 36
But on the very next day, Gough was found at a known “house of assignation” on Walker
Street, not far from the Five Points. 37 The temperance apostle was alive, but appeared delirious,
33
Saxton & Miles at 205 Broadway and William A. Colman’s bookstore at 203 Broadway. See
John Doggett, Supplement to Doggett’s New-York (City) Directory (New York, 1845). That
Saxton & Miles sold Gough’s autobiography can be found in the title page of the
autobiography’s early editions.
34
Saxton & Miles at 205 Broadway and William A. Colman’s bookstore at 203 Broadway. See
John Doggett, Supplement to Doggett’s New-York (City) Directory (New York, 1845). That
Saxton & Miles sold Gough’s autobiography can be found in the title page of the
autobiography’s early editions.
35
The above description is based on New York Journal of Commerce, Sept.13, 1845, in News
Clippings Folio Vol. 2 (ca. 1845-48), p. 1, Gough Papers.
36
New York Sun, Sept. 12. 1845; New York Courier and Enquirer, quoted in Rochester (NY)
Daily Democrat, Sept.15, 1845.
37
The New York Express reported that Gough was found “in the garret of a house of ill fame, in
an alley, up in Walker Street, between Bowery and Centre.” See News Clippings Folio Vol. 2, p.
1, Gough Papers. Benjamin Goodhue, a later critic of Gough gave the location as the “rear of 113
Walker Street.” See National Police Gazette (New York), Jan. 10, 1846.
18
perhaps suffering from an overdose of alcohol or opium. To make matters worse, it was George
Wilkes, editor of the National Police Gazette, a popular scandal-mongering sheet, who had been
responsible for his recovery.
The story, or rather, stories Gough later told about his disappearance was evasive and
incoherent. He blamed his relapse on a plot of the Boston rum-sellers. According to him, he was
met in the street by a con-man who pretended to be his old workmate. The guileless lecturer
claimed that the con-man teased him about his newfound piety and fame and coaxed him into
having a social drink of “soda water.” Gough was lured from the busy thoroughfares into a small
shop with no name on Murray or Warren Street, which he relocated to Chatham Square in a later
telling of the story. The “soda water” was drawn and Gough believed drugged, as he noticed
“glances” being exchanged between his companion and the shopkeeper. In a second telling,
however, he changed the story to exonerate the shopkeeper and fixed the blame on his
companion, who handed him a cup “with a hand over the top” (Gough noted this detail as being
not “gentlemanly”).
Despite his suspicions, Gough drained the cup and became delirious shortly thereafter. Of
how he ended up in a brothel and how he passed the week there, Gough claimed to remember
little. 38 The whole week appeared to him to be “a horrible dream – a nightmare – a something
that [he] cannot describe.” He maintained that he had no sense of time and was shocked to learn
how long he had been “missing.” 39 As for the plotting and drugging, however, he was sure
38
This is what he did remember: “When I saw a woman dressed in black, I either accosted her,
or she accosted me; it is immaterial which, as I was in such a state, that I should not have waited
to think who it was… ” See Gough, Autobiography (Boston, 1847), supplement.
39
Later, Gough would himself note the short-term amnesia as a symptom of madness. See John
B. Gough, Man and His Masters (New York, 1870), 13-14: “I would say, that while it is a
species of insanity, there are peculiarities about it [addiction]. I conversed with an individual
who had been confined in a lunatic asylum for two years. I asked him what he remembered.
19
enough. Of the villain’s tampering with the soda water, Gough affirmed that he was “as
confident…as [he] had seen him.” On the man’s coming and going, Gough had an unusual sense
of clarity: he averred that the man must have come into the city the same night he did, and left
soon after the Friday when he was found and that the whole thing had been a setup. All in all,
Gough’s story was rich in sensibility, commensurate with his new social class and piety, and
short on lucid facts. It was obviously made up to exonerate himself, akin to using the insanity
plea, and at the same time, to discourage serious investigation. 40
The scandal was a pivotal moment for Gough and for the temperance movement. This
was his second time falling off the wagon. The first known relapse of his was over two years
earlier, about six months after he first signed the pledge in October 1842. The circumstances of
his first relapse bore a remarkable resemblance to the second. On both occasions, the lecturer
wandered off, went on a binge, and turned up after some time. Both times, he cited strange
sensations. The first was attributed to a head injury suffered in his childhood, and the second to a
cup of soda water. For both mishaps, he blamed his old associates, presumably workingmen
from whom he had risen. 41 The scandal of 1845 was different, however, as Gough was a
different man. After re-signing his pledge, he married for a second time to a respectable though
not wealthy New England woman, became a convert of the evangelical Congregational Church,
and befriended prominent evangelical reformers and philanthropists. He had turned his back on
Washingtonianism, the grassroots teetotal self-help movement started by independent artisans,
‘Nothing but an indistinct recollection of something, I hardly know what.’ And when he was
released he was astonished to find he had been there for two years.”
40
For a compilation of different versions of the story, see New York Herald, Sept. 14, 1845. The
“official” statement issued by Gough was published in most papers on or around Sept. 26, 1845
and was printed as a supplement in his autobiography.
41
The story of the first relapse was given in the autobiography.
20
which had worked miracles in converting heavy drinkers and liquor dealers (including Gough
himself) to teetotalism. He now spoke mostly for respectable and paying audiences - ladies in
particular, and he was frequently invited to lecture in churches. He campaigned with the
evangelicals against liquor licensing, demonized the liquor dealers in keeping with the crusading
spirit, 42 and preached the gospel of domesticity and female influence. 43 Gough was the biggest
catch for the evangelical reformers who wanted to co-opt the grassroots temperance movement
of the early 1840s and redirect its energy toward legal prohibition (in the form of “local option”
laws) and religious revivals. Gough made great conquests for them in the Northeast and even in
the Upper South. He had become the face of the evangelical temperance movement and the
emblem for the upward mobility promised by teetotalism and piety. And now he had just become
the movement’s greatest liability.
Gough’s scandal was more than just an embarrassment for the evangelical temperance
party. Tens of thousands participated in the discussion of the scandal and its meaning, thanks to
the extended press coverage – Gough’s scandal was easily the bestselling story of the year. The
collective silence of the moral press on the details of the scandal left much room for imagination
and commercial exploitation by the “unscrupulous” journalists. The desperate defense of Gough
and the drugging story by the moral press sparked animated public debates over the essence of
42
Gough’s old position on the rum-seller was described as follows by the True Washingtonian
(Portland, ME), n.d., News Clippings Folio Vol. 1, Gough Papers: “He [Gough] is a man of mind
and independence enough to held on to his principles and not to veer with the breeze of the place
where he is...We were highly pleased at the remarks to the youth, in which he said, never treat a
rum-seller or an inebriate with disrespect- never insult them, hallo after them, or their children.
Treat them kindly, if you would win them.”
43
Gough was frequently invited to speak, for example, by the Boston Female Benevolent Total
Abstinence Society, Harper Union, No. 11, Daughters of Temperance in New York, and by the
Ladies Temperance Union of Philadelphia. Gough’s support for legal prohibition was made
unmistakable at the end of the first editions of his Autobiography published in 1845, and the few
sentences were deleted in the enlarged edition of the Autobiography in 1868.
21
manhood, the cult of sincerity, the commercialization of reform, and ultimately, the question of
moral authority. This chapter traces the divergent public responses to Gough’s scandal to
illuminate not only the growing social and cultural chasms of the mid-Victorian urban society
but also the inner divisions of the temperance movement.
The Web of Sympathy
In spite of the many inconsistencies and loopholes in Gough’s self-defense, a group of
temperance reformers and ardent supporters of Gough rallied behind his drugging story and
weaved a web of sympathy around the “victim.” They closed ranks and against great odds
returned Gough to the platform shortly after his fall. The wealth and social influence, which had
raised Gough up and borne him over the scandal, appears to be relatively new (post-AmericanRevolution) in mintage and preponderantly Yankee (New-England-born) in origin. In Boston,
Gough had a patron and adviser in Moses Grant, a retired paper and upholstery dealer in Boston,
listed as one of the richest men in Massachusetts. 44 A well-known philanthropist and benefactor
of the temperance movement, Grant was also known to have refused selling paper to William
Lloyd Garrison, whose abolitionist paper Liberator he deemed “an injurious if not an incendiary
sheet.” 45
In New York, the beleaguered lecturer found shelter and support at the homes of George
Hurlbut and George Clinton Ripley, ensconced in the fashionable Brooklyn Heights. The
Hurlbuts came from New London, CT. They owned the New York-based shipping firm, E. D.
Hurlbut & Co., and struck gold dealing in Southern cotton. George Hurlbut was praised at his
funeral for his social conservatism and his intolerance for “the radical views which are becoming
44
A. Forbes and J. W. Green, The Rich Men of Massachusetts (Boston, 1851), 31-2.
45
See William Lloyd Garrison, The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison (6 vols., Boston, 1981), 6:
302.
22
so fashionable at the present day.” 46 George Clinton Ripley, who assisted Hurlbut in his effort to
protect Gough, was a native of Oakham, MA and a neighbor and close friend with the Hurlbuts.
He was then clerking with the New York dry goods firm, Holbrook, Nelson, & Co., and he later
went on to make his fortune in the life insurance business. 47
In Philadelphia, where lists of Gough supporters’ names were published, his support base
proved to be solidly evangelical and bourgeois (see Appendix II). The city’s highly publicized
campaign (a “Gough Festival”) to vindicate Gough’s character and welcome his return was led
by evangelical ministers, especially New School Presbyterians and Congregationalists, and by
men of the professions, including law, medicine, dentistry, publishing, daguerreotype, and
mission/reform. Although Gough claimed limited support among the Episcopalian (two out of
twenty) and the Baptist (three out of sixteen) ministers, it is noteworthy that he had none from
the Old School Presbyterians, Quakers, Methodists, Unitarians, or any of the African American
churches in the city. Neither did the “Proper Philadelphians” of established and wealthy families
nor the temperance workingmen take part in the campaign. 48
Evangelical bourgeois women were a mainstay for Gough during the scandal. In
Philadelphia, in particular, the Ladies’ Temperance Union of the City and County of
Philadelphia (formed in the winter of 1845 and almost named after the fallen apostle) threw their
46
Rev. William Beale Lewis, Christ Would Have His People Where He Is: A Sermon, Preached
in the Third Presbyterian Church, Brooklyn, NY (New York, 1846), 26-27.
47
Ripley named his son George Hurlbut. He and George Hurlbut were both members of the
Brooklyn New England Society. Elsie Ripley Clapp, granddaughter of George Ripley,
remembered him fondly, many years after he died, as a supporter of the Underground Railroad
and the anti-slavery movement, but this cannot be independently verified. See Sam Stack, Elsie
Ripley Clapp: Her Life and the Community School (New York, 2004), 11.
48
Based on the names published on a leaflet advertising for “The Feast of Reason” (a festival
benefit for Gough) in News Clippings Folio Vol. 2, Gough Papers, and McElroy’s Philadelphia
Directory (Philadelphia, 1845-1847).
23
weight behind Gough and played a prominent role in the publicity stunt to reinstate him. 49 The
officers of the society were connected to Gough’s male supporters by family and social network,
and evidence suggests that they had used their social network well to enlist sympathy and
backing for Gough’s return. Cynthia P. Collins, for example, an officer of the Ladies’ Union and
wife of a Yankee bookseller in Philadelphia, was the lynchpin connecting at least five members
on the lists of Gough supporters. 50 Mrs. Harriet Probasco, a woman printer (widow) and editor of
the nativist (anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant, and anti-drink) magazine American Women, was a
signer of the Ladies’ Union’s pro-Gough circular and a strong advocate of extending “the novel,
conservative principle of female influence” to relieve American society of “anarchy, misrule, and
foreign influence.” 51
Perhaps none was a better example of the conservative nature of Gough’s public support
than Rev. John Chambers, the minister of the First Independent (read, evangelical
49
“A Temperance Movement,” n.d., in New Clippings Folio Vol. 2, p. 65, Gough Papers. They
had wanted to name their society after Gough (“Gough Union”). Other examples of ladies’
societies were the Boston Female Benevolent Total Abstinence Society and the Franklin Union,
No. 1, and the Harper Union, No. 11, of the Daughters of Temperance in New York.
50
Cynthia P. Collins was the wife of Simeon Collins, a Yankee bookseller and a public supporter
of Gough’s return. She was the mother of Frances Amelia Collins, who served as the
corresponding secretary of the Ladies Temperance Union, and of two brothers (David and
Thomas) who ran a daguerreotype studio in Philadelphia and managed to have Gough sit for a
half-plate portrait at the height of the scandal (on Jan 31st, 1846). The Collins brothers were then
partners (and later competitors) in the daguerreotype business with Marcus Aurelius Root, who
was persuaded to join Gough’s welcome-back campaign. The Collins Papers, which I have yet to
consult, are held by the Clements Library of the University of Michigan. Other examples of the
family ties among Gough supporters include Miss Mary Ann Rhoads, (again born in New
England), who must have helped convince her brother-in-law, Edwin Booth, a broker in
Philadelphia, to lend his name to the “Gough Festival,” Dr. James Bryan and wife Elizabeth L.
Bryan, and Miss M’Calla and her father William M’Calla.
51
As quoted in Bruce Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women: Gender in the Antebellum City
(Ithaca, 2002), 218; Judith A. Hunter, “Beyond Pluralism: The Political Culture of Nativism in
Philadelphia” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1999), 208. Mrs. Probasco became a member of the
Rosine Society (for the reclamation and reformation of “fallen women”) in 1855.
24
Congregational) Church of Philadelphia, who had a ubiquitous presence in the meetings of the
Ladies’ Temperance Union and who always spoke for the ladies in public.52 An anti-Calvinist
firebrand and an emotional preacher, he was a most ardent supporter of temperance and of
Gough, and yet he was also a strident critic of women’s rights and a die-hard defender of slavery
(allegedly a friend of President James Buchanan’s). He would later be remembered as having
shouted down Antoinette Brown, who tried to speak at the World’s Temperance Convention held
in New York in 1852. His intransigence on the slavery issue and his apathy toward the Union
war effort ultimately led to the split of his church and the walkout of its anti-slavery members. 53
The core of Gough’s social support, as brought to light by the scandal, came from a class of
society characterized by Arminian piety (emphasizing moral agency and outward display of
piety), social reformism expressed through conservatism (Federalist-inspired reform to restore
and preserve social order), and newfound economic prosperity; they were the new elite of the
American Northeast who amassed their fortune after the Revolution, as opposed to the cultured
old elite of inherited wealth. While they played an important role in the temperance movement,
especially in its legislative and political wing, and in other ameliorative reforms and charities,
they generally avoided entanglement in abolition and women’s rights, as these “radical views”
were thought to endanger social peace (and were perhaps considered the idiosyncrasies of the old
money). Moses Grant, for example, had repeatedly turned down the abolitionist Weston sisters’
52
He presided at every meeting of the Ladies Temperance Union. It is likely that the officers of
the Ladies’ Union were members of his evangelical church.
53
For a biography, see Rev. Wm. Elliot Griffis, John Chambers, Servant of God and Master of
Hearts, and His Ministry in Philadelphia (Ithaca, 1903). He was outspoken in his Arminian
(anti-Calvinist) views in the Presbyterian schism (between the New School and the Old School)
and had to seek ordination from the New Divinity Taylorites in New Haven. For his role in the
World’s Temperance Convention, see History of Woman Suffrage, ed., Elizabeth Cady Stanton,
Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage (2 vols., New York, 1881) 1: 508-509.
25
invitation to join the anti-slavery cause, citing his singular devotion to temperance. 54 Indeed,
there was no reason or incentive for them to touch these issues in their times, and most of them
had an invested interest in the status quo and were content with their social and political
conservatism. For this very reason, none of these conservative reformers are remembered today
(see Appendix I).
The Paper War
To be sure, a lot of people found Gough’s story hard to swallow. These included not only those
who understood the workings of the New York underworld or those who spurned evangelical
reform, but also the religious and the abstinent. Most talk of the scandal had probably taken place
inside clubs and saloons, on street corners, or in private letters and journals. Philip Hone, the
diarist, mocked Gough the “Temperance Quixote” in his diary:
He [Gough] gives but a lame account of his experiences, his persecutions, and his
temptations, equal as would appear to those of St. Anthony, but it looks mightily as if
this “reformed” drunkard had become re-reformed, and was now but little better than
one of the sinful. 55
Henry M. Alexander, an attorney in New York City, reported the public reaction to the scandal
in a private letter to his brother-in-law Joseph Henry in Washington, D.C.:
Gough still seems to attract attention in Boston – while here [in New York], except
by some of the warmest of his personal friends, he is condemned for his last fall. I am
not acquainted with a man of respectability in the City who does not doubt the truth
of his story… No one is a greater friend to the Temperance Cause than I am, but I
54
Caroline Weston, of the Weston-Chapman families, sponsors of Garrison, had been sending
Moses Grant anti-slavery literature, and Grant adamantly refused to do more than pay lip service
to the anti-slavery cause. Moses Grant to Caroline Weston, July 23, 1835; Caroline Weston to
Moses Grant, Nov. 24, 1842, in Moses Grant (1785-1861) Correspondence, Manuscript
Collection, Boston Public Library.
55
The Diary of Philip Hone, 1828-1851, ed. Allan Nevins (New York, 1936), 746: Monday, Sept.
15 [1845] – A Temperance Quixote.
26
can’t as a part of my creed swallow this story, which is so palpably against all the
testimony in the case. 56
Despite the prevalence of anti-Gough feelings, it was the popular penny papers and “police
journals” that turned private gossips, personal gripes, and inside jokes into public protest. The
attacks against Gough, in turn, gave rise to vehement responses from his friends in the press. The
papers quickly split into pro and anti Gough camps. While the anti-Gough editors called his story
a lie and condemned him and his supporters as hypocrites, the pro-Gough press defended
Gough’s innocence, urged public commiseration, and applauded his swift return.
Although the scandal took place in New York, Gough’s defense team in the press was
headed by the Yankees. David Hale, owner and editor of the New York Journal of Commerce,
Gough’s chosen organ in the city, was a native of Coventry, CT and then a Brooklyn resident,
and he had taken over the Sabbatarian business journal from the Tappan brothers. Hale was a
strict adherent to Congregationalism and a shrewd investor in real estate. He was responsible for
the purchase of the New York Broadway Tabernacle, a Presbyterian free church originally built
for the famous evangelist Charles G. Finney, and for turning it into a Congregational church and
Gough’s bully pulpit. 57
Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune came from Amherst, NH, and he was a strong
supporter of Gough and of the evangelical-led anti-liquor-licensing campaign. He was an all-
56
The Papers of Joseph Henry, ed. Marc Rothenberg, et. al. (12 vols., Washington, D.C., 1992),
6:365-366.
57
For David Hale and the Journal of Commerce, see Joseph P. Thompson, Memoir of David
Hale (New York, 1850), 96-107 and Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Lewis Tappan and the Evangelical
War Against Slavery (Cleveland, OH, 1969), 54-55. The New York Tabernacle was Gough’s
“bully pulpit” in New York City. His controversial purchase and re-sale of the Tabernacle is
recounted in Thompson, Memoir. For his role in purchasing property and organizing the
Plymouth Church, see New York Times, Mar. 22nd, 1875. Hale left behind $75,000 to $80,000 for
his heirs when he died in 1848.
27
around reform enthusiast (temperance, vegetarianism, Fourierism, spiritualism, etc.) but was not
fond of abolition in the 1840s and would later move gingerly toward political anti-slavery (Free
Soil). In 1841, he launched the New York Tribune with the blessing of the Whig bosses to
counteract what he saw as immoral and Democratic-leaning penny papers. 58
Leander Richardson Streeter, or “Corporal Streeter,” with his newly published Boston
Daily Star, quickly became the spokesman in Boston for Gough and his friends during the
scandal. He had been a portrait painter and erstwhile editor of the Richmond (VA) Star. 59 He
started the Boston Daily Star in October 1845, seeking a niche in an already-crowded Boston
news market by branding the paper a pro-temperance (pro-legal-suasion) daily and by featuring
full-length reports of lectures and sermons. 60 Streeter attacked Charles Francis Adams and his
Boston Daily Whig in 1846 as “a pretended Whig” for his anti-slavery sympathies. 61
Gough also had the backing of almost all the pro-legal-suasion temperance journals. Jesse
W. Goodrich, native of Pittsfield, MA and known to be one of Gough’s early friends and an
58
See Horace Greeley, Recollections of a Busy Life (New York, 1868), 136-8; Allan Nevins,
“Horace Greeley,” Dictionary of American Biography (1931), 528-534; Mitchell Snay, Horace
Greeley and the Politics of Reform in Nineteenth-Century America (Lanham, MD; Plymouth,
UK, 2011), Chapters 4, 5, 6, and 7. Greely finally moved to all-out abolition (while vacillating
on how to end the war and slavery) during the Civil War (but then the entire political landscape
had been altered) and because of his public role as the outspoken editor of the New York Tribune,
he was always associated with the left-wing Republican Party. It is ironic that he retreated in the
early 1870s from Radical Reconstruction, which had become unpopular, to run for President in
1872 on the Democratic ticket. Commenting on Greeley’s inconsistencies, Mitchell Snay
observes that “the Civil War raised in stark form the dilemmas of nineteenth-century liberalism.”
(132)
59
He was the editor of Richmond (VA) Star, from 1840 to ab. May 30th, 1845.
60
Wesley T. Mott, “The Eloquence of Father Taylor: A Rare 1846 Eyewitness Report,” New
England Quarterly 17 (Mar. 1997), 102-113. Mott argues that the Star wanted to transcend the
ephemeral nature of newspapers.
61
Streeter attacked Charles Francis Adams and his paper, the Boston Daily Whig, as “pretended
Whigs,” for their anti-slavery sympathies. New Hampshire Patriot (Concord, NH), Oct. 29,1846.
28
instrument in his reformation, edited the Massachusetts Cataract and Worcester County
Waterfall and had led the break with the moral suasionist Washingtonian teetotalers in Worcester;
Benjamin Webb Williams, born in Salem and editor of the Taunton (MA) Dew Drop, was
actively involved in the no-license campaign and later in the agitation for passing a prohibitory
“Maine Law” in Massachusetts; Rev. John Marsh, born in Wethersfield, CT and trained for the
ministry at Yale under Timothy Dwight, was the long-time secretary of the evangelical-led
American Temperance Union, which had tried to co-opt the Washingtonians into the legislative
campaign, and he edited the New-York-based Journal of the American Temperance Union.
One way or another, the leading defenders of Gough in the press were implicated in his
rise to fame, connected to the Yankee evangelical business community, and enthusiastic about
the legislative campaign against liquor licensing. These Yankee scribes were neither naïve
believers in fantastical stories nor neophytes in the business of journalism; they were
experienced in news making and politicking, and they had a practical sense of the market and
their audience. Supporting Gough was a strategic decision and a collective endeavor. They
echoed one another and formed a coherent voice of Yankee reformers and a tight-knit
community of Yankee compatriots.
In contrast, Gough’s opponents in the press were of diverse origins (though centered in
New York) and were not always a cohesive lot. Leading the opposition were the printer-editors
of a few popular New York papers, who defied the moral authority of the reformers. Gough met
his most formidable opponents in the New York Herald, the city’s most-read daily paper edited
by James Gordon Bennett; the Subterranean, an anti-Tammany workingman’s journal edited by
Irish immigrant Mike Walsh; and the National Police Gazette, a scandal-mongering weekly
edited by George Wilkes, who was the first to discover Gough’s whereabouts. The already
29
voluminous press about the scandal was condensed, analyzed, and circulated in a pamphlet titled
Goffiana, which promised a full review of Gough’s life and writings, and the author of the
pamphlet, William Joseph Snelling, would later become the editor of the Boston Herald and a
thorn in the side of Gough and his friends in Boston. Two of theses editors, George Wilkes and
William Joseph Snelling, were veterans of the risqué Sunday Flash, a rakish paper that promised
to expose rakes and rogues. James Gordon Bennett’s Herald, known for its caustic editorials and
off-color crime and trial reports, had borne the brunt of the “moral war” launched by the
respectable press to boycott and muffle the paper in the early 1840s, and it boasted the largest
daily circulation in the United States. Mike Walsh was known to be the leader of a gang of Irish
workingmen toughs known as the Spartan Band and an outspoken critic of reform societies.
All these were self-made men who embarked on their editorial career with little money
and no ties to the Yankee business community. Two of the editors were foreign born: Bennett
was Scottish and Walsh was Irish. Bennett sailed alone at the age of fourteen. Walsh left Ireland
for New York with his father when he was a small boy. Snelling was born in Boston, son of an
army officer and a West Point dropout, and he had an adventurous youth in the Illinois Territory
as a fur trader. 62 Wilkes was the son of a cabinet maker and a native-born New Yorker, reared
and educated in the streets, and he had intimate connections with the denizens of the New York
underworld. 63
62
In St. Louis and later in Fort Snelling, one of the military outposts (set up to protect the fur
trade), located on the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers.
63
For biographies on Mike Walsh, see Robert Ernst, “The One and Only Mike Walsh,” NewYork Historical Society Quarterly 36 (1952) and Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York
City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850 (New York, 1984), 326-35; for W.
J. Snelling and Geo.Wilkes, see Patricia C. Cohen, et. al., The Flash Press: Sporting Male
Weeklies in 1840s New York (Chicago, 2008), 28-36, 41-45; for Bennett, see Isaac Clarke Pray,
Memoirs of James Gordon Bennett and His Times (New York, 1855) and Andie Tucher, Froth &
30
These were footloose and aspiring men who traveled widely in search for employment
and excitement and who could relate to Gough’s workingman past better than his latter-day
friends. They came of age in the rough and tumble world of men and lacked, or rather devalued,
female influence in their life (Mothers, wives, and daughters were conspicuously absent in their
biographies, except perhaps in their obituaries). 64 Each had made a name and a living for himself
in the new form of popular journalism that emerged in the 1830s. They took pride in being
politically independent, and boasted that their papers were not financed by any political party or
interest group, but they did not shy away from politicking. Their editorial style was brisk and
combative. Always eager to defend their honor, they readily engaged in personal invectives and
each had their own scrapes with the libel law. They shared a common interest in depicting vice
and often showed off populist and anti-clerical sentiments. Although they knew each other well,
they did not always get along, and they competed with one another for a share in the marketplace
of news and gossip. They were men of the world and believers in laissez-faire in the age of
market capitalism. 65
The fall of the temperance apostle presented these editors a rare opportunity to sell their
papers. Their opposition to the moral press caused a backlash against the evangelical and wellto-do temperance reformers and it also gave a public voice to the shared resentment against the
Scum : Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and the Ax Murder in America's First Mass Medium (Chapel
Hill, NC, 1994).
64
In many ways, their life stories mirrored Gough’s except on the point of the female influence.
There’s a possibility that Gough had refashioned himself in that regard.
65
For different analyses of the culture of the “manly men,” see Cohen, et. al., The Flash Press,
55-76; Richard B. Stott, Jolly Fellows: Male Milieus in Nineteenth-Century America (Baltimore,
2009), 9, 57, 60; Elliott J. Gorn, The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America (Ithaca,
1986); Amy S. Greenberg, Cause for Alarm: The Volunteer Fire Department in the NineteenthCentury City (Princeton, 1998), 70.
31
temperance movement and the threat it posed to the new urban pleasure culture and to men’s
control over their social life. While the tension had already been there, the scandal brought it to
the flash point.
Bennett championed the traditional ethic of moderation in drinking against the new
doctrine of teetotalism. “[C]ommon sense and reason,” according to him, dictated that we use
“good wine and liquor, as it was intended to be used by its bestower, that is in moderation, and
when we required it.” Moderate drinkers who could “maintain their equilibrium” did not need
the protection of the pledge. Drunkards, however, were “cursed with an innate appetite for
stimulus of some kind.” They could not be expected to “change the nature which they
unfortunately are born with and probably inherit” by simply signing a pledge. “[I]f they do not
indulge in liquor,” he remarked: “they will in something else.” The pledge of total abstinence, in
his view, was unnecessary for the moderate drinker and useless for the drunkard.66
Bennett’s attack was not so much noted in the moral press for its formulation of the
pathological cause of drunkenness. In fact, he did not differ drastically from the teetotalers in
asserting that habitual drunkenness was an incurable and possibly inheritable disease.67 Neither
Gough nor his teetotal friends had preached that the total abstinence pledge offered a complete
and permanent cure of addiction; rather, it worked only when it was kept. They allowed for one’s
constitution and temperament in forming addiction and acknowledged occasional relapses as
evidence of the need for perpetual vigilance. 68 However, the moral press faulted Bennett for his
66
New York Herald, Sept. 14, 1845.
67
It is worth noting that Lyman Beecher advanced the same kind of fatalistic argument about the
drunkards, though Beecher emphasized the moral impairment and spiritual death brought on by
alcohol. See Lyman Beecher, Six Sermons on Intemperance (New York, 1827).
68
Gough had preached that the desire may have been lying dormant but would be aroused by a
single drop, and he repeatedly stated that some type of people, like him (passionate), were more
32
implicit rejection of the perceived danger in moderate drinking (that “requirement” inevitably
became dependence) and for his denial of the general efficacy of the public ceremony of signing
and keeping the pledge. While reform-minded editors like Horace Greeley argued that selfcontrol could only come through total abstinence and would not be achieved without public
testimonial, group support, and legal prohibition, 69 Bennett presented self-control as an entirely
private affair – a question of personal resolve – and as the mastery (rather than denial) of one’s
appetite. His commentary articulated the persistent popular belief in the wholesome quality of
alcohol and its proper usage and reduced intemperance into an individual (rather than a social)
problem.
Bennett found in the scandal a cause for moral rebellion and probably the satisfaction of
moral revenge. He unleashed a torrent of invective against the moral reformers for their
hypocrisy in vouching for the innocence of a fallen man. He argued that the self-styled moralists
who had denounced his paper were actually the secret agent of moral corruption. They formed
“an absolute party and a powerful clique in American society,” they gained a “perfect monopoly
of all religion, piety, and virtue,” and they held “an iron reign of moral terror in the community.”
They forced moral conformity, by making teetotalism a political and social problem and
“shov[ing] it down the throats of those who ventured to oppose it.” They hired “a class of
rogues” like Gough, encouraged “genteel vice and pious iniquity,” and claimed the exclusive
right to “coin money, honor, and respectability by grave and pious howl and cant.” They were
held together by the “mesmeric attraction of mutual support,” protected those who “belong to
prone to excessive drinking and more likely to become “addicted” than others (the phlegmatic
type).
69
New York Tribune, Sept. 18, 1845
33
their class and favor their ‘cause’,” and labeled whoever opposed them as “an atheist, an infidel,
and an enemy of religion.” 70
Taking on the clique of moral autocrats and hypocrites, Bennett refashioned himself into
a crusading “public journalist.” Gough was a “public character.” and “the public,” Bennett
argued, “had a perfect right to demand all the circumstances of the case.” As a public journalist,
Bennett claimed to shoulder a “solemn duty to act, in matters of public morality, like a Board of
Health – to expose the danger of the spread of false principles, and to put…in quarantine, the
pernicious conduct and doctrines which are ever struggling to sally forth from their hiding places,
to spread moral devastation in the community.” He was to become an independent voice of
public conscience, the republican critic of privilege and corruption, and the new guardian of
public morality - that is, if we take his gallant speech at face value. 71
But Bennett’s rhetoric was far more radical than his politics. On numerous controversial
issues of the day, including temperance, slavery, labor, and the Anti-Rent protest in upstate New
York, Bennett represented the status quo and resisted the radical remaking of social order.72 He
opposed the teetotal movement, vilified the anti-slavery advocates, and defended the landed
interests of the patroons and large landholders. He was not so much resurrecting the artisan
republic and its egalitarian ideals (as historian Alexander Saxton suggested) 73 as he was
70
New York Herald, Dec. 28, 1845.
71
Ibid.
72
Pray, Memoirs of James Gordon Bennett , 357-8.
73
Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture
in Nineteenth-Century America (London and New York, 1990).
34
defending the “natural” progression of market capitalism and the individualistic laissez-faire
approach to social problems. 74
Bennett was no more disinterested in the scandal than his opponents in the press; he was
concerned, first and foremost, with the sale of his paper. Historian Andie Tucher took issue with
the conventional historical narrative of the development of objective news reporting in relation to
the democratization of culture in the era of the penny press. She argues that antebellum culture
was “not so much democratized as differentiated,” and that what distinguished the penny press
was not so much the “belief in facts” or the “distrust of the reality, or objectivity, of values,” 75
but the journalistic shaping of “congenial” facts according to the differentiated tastes of their
readers. Bennett was competing with rival journalists (like Horace Greeley of the Tribune) in the
same marketplace for readers of similar economic standing (the “middle class”), and he found
his audience among the fun-loving and voyeuristic portion of the urban middle-class readers
(while Greeley had more appeal among the moralistic). 76 Therefore, to some degree at least,
Bennett was exploiting the scandal and haranguing the moral reformers for the sake of his
readers. Bennett’s diatribe reflected and articulated the profound disaffection of the fun-loving,
theatre-going, and wine-bibbing urbanites with evangelical social reform. He translated the
popular anti-temperance sentiment into public speech and a counterattack (versed in moral terms)
against evangelical social reform.
74
Historian Andie Tucher highlighted the pecuniary aspect of Bennett’s venture. Tucher, Froth
and Scum, 16.
75
Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (New
York, 1978), 60.
76
Tucher, Froth and Scum, Ch. 12.
35
Mike Walsh, the truculent and street-smart editor of the Subterranean, took the antireform tirade even further. If Bennett had appealed to the cigar-smoking readers in gentlemen’s
clubs and clerks in saloons with his moral revisionism, Walsh wrote unapologetically for the
rowdy journeymen of the “Bowery B’hoy” type, and he found in the scandal another occasion to
vent his anger at what he saw as the feminizing tendency of evangelical reform. Walsh regarded
the “supposed virtues” of evangelical reformers – not just total abstinence from alcohol, but the
entire health reform program, including vegetarianism and male continence - as “nothing but
physical defects.” Male passions and desires, for him, were not something to be suppressed but
valorized. Gough was a great temperance lecturer because he had “carnal passions” and “strong
desires.” Most evangelical reformers, in contrast, had emasculated themselves. The “fishblooded calves who live on bran bread and water” had no passion to begin with and no ability to
speak of. Walsh essentially equated abstinence with impotence and indulgence with vigor.
“Every man with fire and brains,” he proclaimed: “gets Goughed once in a while.” 77
Walsh was not overtly hostile toward Gough until the publication of his drugging story.
Walsh took offense, perhaps not so much because the story was a lie, but rather because of its
lack of self-assertion. While Gough used to be one of the B’hoys (“a man,” according to Walsh,
“who evidently loves fun, and enjoys a joke”), he had adopted the (false) sensibility of the
evangelical reformers. Gough’s public statement showed an excess of refined sentiments and
tears but no fire or sense of honor. Gough dared not “come out like a man” either to tell the
“plain truth” or to defy the overly inquisitive to “go the devil and find out.” His deliberate
77
Subterranean (New York, NY), Sept. 27, 1845. Walsh probably invented the term “Goughed,”
which became quite popular for a time, and he used it on the Hunker Democrats, as in
Subterranean, Oct. 11, 1845.
36
equivocation, rather than his carousing, degraded Gough as a man in Walsh’s estimation and
made him a “servile, selfish, and unprincipled money-worshipping humbug.” 78
Walsh’s editorial featured the “masculine” and oftentimes ribald urban slang of the
barroom against the “feminine,” polite, and sentimental pleadings of Gough and his friends. 79
Walsh made no attempt to “moralize” his argument; rather, he flaunted unbridled male passions
and desires and was deliberately confrontational. He championed a style of manliness that was
born of the urban pleasure culture, subsisting in the flash press, and marginalized (as belonging
to the lower classes or race) by reformers. His unique blend of sexual virility and manly honor,
to which he added his egalitarian politics, struck a chord among a group of roughneck
workingmen of New York City in the 1840s, who cheered him on as he scathed and de-sexed the
“milk and water men.” 80 They chafed at the evangelical social campaign against drink,
prostitution, and blood sports, which they saw as part of an increasingly alienating social order
78
Subterranean, Oct. 4, 1845; Kenneth S. Greenberg has accurately pinpointed male honor as
not “do not tell a lie” but rather “do not suffer to be given the lie.” See Greenberg, Honor &
Slavery (Princeton, NJ, 1996), 8-9.
79
For example, compare the language of Subterranean, Sept. 13, 1845 with that of New York
Express, n.d., News Clipping, Folio Vol. 2, p. 6, Gough Papers.
“[I]t was ascertained that he [Gough] had been propelling to such an extent that he was incapable
of leaving the crib where he got pulverized. The temperance men looked rather soft when John
was discovered, though there are very few of them who would not be caught in a similar snap
much oftener than he is, if their insignificance did not cloak them.” (Subterranean)
“How keenly he suffered before yielding to temptation, none can tell, and least of all can we
realize the terrible conflict through which his mind and judgment must have passed when fairly
in the power of his enemies. The case is one to bring itself home to most men’s bosoms, and
families. Who of us are without frailties? Who of us, if guiltless of this one vice of intemperance,
are free from all other errors of conduct- and how few of us there are, who, if not wounded in our
own bosoms, can look abroad even upon those we love, who are, it may be, our kith and kin, and
not see in them what we are almost eager to make a jest of, and condemn in those who to us are
as strangers?” (N.Y. Express)
80
Anon., Sketches of the Speeches and Writings of Michael Walsh (New York, 1843), 11.
37
superimposed on them. Their economic independence had been compromised by the financial
meltdown of 1837, which continued well into the 40s and consolidated capital and the nonmanual professions at their expense. The economic foundation and the social milieu of the manly
men were being eroded, and the very existence of manly honor itself was obscured by the cult of
sensibility. In opposing Gough and his friends, Walsh chose to strike a manly pose that had
become not only decidedly unrespectable but deliberately subversive.
George Wilkes of the National Police Gazette and William Joseph Snelling of Goffiana
steered clear of the temperance issue altogether and avoided direct attacks against the principles
of reform. They were not overtly subversive; rather, they claimed to be helping the temperance
movement by sifting chaff from wheat, lest the movement should go down with a fallen apostle.
Their target was Gough and his chief supporters – a particular faction within the temperance
movement. They refused to heed Gough’s friends’ call for privacy and sympathy. Gough’s
stature as a “public reformer” and “the type of the temperance movement,” according to Wilkes
and Snelling, warranted their special attention and the public examination of the details in his
scandal. 81 They did not dwell on the moral consequences and far-reaching implications of the
scandal; rather, they digested the “facts” in Gough’s case for the public and ridiculed the sense of
reality that was being upheld by the coterie of Gough’s friends. Their gauge of truthfulness was
common sense and street knowledge. Their weapon of choice was satire. Their goal was not to
conceive a moral lesson for the scandal, nor was it a fastidious adherence to truth, as it turned out,
but to generate sustained public interest and to realize the full market value of Gough’s scandal.
81
National Police Gazette, Dec. 13, 1845. “He has been made the type of the temperance reform;
an importance has been given to him; he does interest the public; he has made himself public
property. There are some thousands of his fellow citizens keenly desirous of knowing all about
him, and it is no more than right that they should be satisfied.”
38
For the curious public, Wilkes and Snelling were happy to supply the missing details of
the scandal. Wilkes, being the discoverer of Gough’s hiding place, may have timed his
“exposure” to coincide with the publicity campaign in the moral press for Gough’s return to the
platform three months after the scandal. He reported that on being “surprised in his shame,”
Gough offered him hush money and begged the editor not to “expose” him. The villain’s name
was then given by Gough positively as Jonathan Williamson, which had since become Williams
in the public statement; the shop where Gough drank the soda water was not some unidentifiable
place on Chatham or on Warren or Murray, but the known apothecary of Thompson & Wellers
on Broadway; and Gough felt the unusual exhilaration, not after, but before the villain vanished,
and the latter “looked into his face with a devilish expression of exultation which he never
should forget, - no, never, never should forget!” All these details Gough had later altered or
omitted in his official statement. He was most evasive about Williams(on)’s appearance (despite
the devilish stare) and the location of the soda shop. Wilkes sneered at the deliberate obfuscation:
Gough had “forgotten everything except that which we can most distinctly prove.” Moreover, he
ridiculed Gough’s affectation: “The mysterious, unpolished Jonathan Williams betrayed his
ignorance of manners by handing a glass of soda water with raspberry syrup, to a gentleman,
with his hand over the top.” 82
Gough’s insanity defense could not stand, Wilkes and Snelling argued, for he had been
seen on Saturday back in the Croton Hotel (and changed into a new suit of clothes) before he
found his way back to the house on Walker Street, which Wilkes described as “most obscurely
82
National Police Gazette, Dec. 13, 1845.
39
located” and “a perfect labyrinth in its entrances and avenues.” 83 Gough had to be not only
conscious, but adroit in negotiating the maze of side streets, back alleys, and dark passageways
(Wilkes compared him to the “amorous dabsters [i.e., experts] of the Bowery or Park Row”).
Gough’s doubt as to the character of the house was unwarranted, because, to Wilkes’ knowledge,
no other house but a bordello would accommodate a wealthy young gentleman on a spree (and
for a week) and give him access to a woman’s bedroom. “No four decent women in the Union,”
Snelling argued, “would suffer themselves to be branded as harlots in the newspapers, from
Maine to Florida, without applying to the law for redress.” 84 He charged, on the basis of Gough’s
recourse to the libel law only a few months earlier (May 1845) against his slanderers, that his
inaction in the present case against the editors of the Police Gazette (Wilkes had invited Gough
to sue him) constituted evidence of his fear of investigation and hence of his guilt.
Although Wilkes and Snelling posed as detectives and crusaders for truth, it is often hard
to separate their facts from fiction. They kept up readers’ interest by churning out stories of
Gough’s “sordid” past. While they taxed Gough’s defenders with using “hearsay” evidence, they
did not shy away themselves from printing rumors or outright fabrications. Wilkes tried to
impress upon the readers that Gough was in the habit of visiting bawdy houses and he had
known the ladies in the house since his early days in New York. Snelling had probably invented
the story that “Jonathan Williams” was finally found in Boston, whose real name he gave as
Rothe, who was an Englishman and who admitted to having met and drank brandy with Gough
(“three several times”) in New York on that fateful evening. The wildest rumor circulated,
83
Wilkes, a regular visitor to brothels, claimed to have found Gough in a “back bedroom” of a
“rickety rear-building” after mounting “two flights of stairs” and taking “the first passage that
offered.” National Police Gazette, Dec. 13, 1845.
84
W. J. Snelling, Goffiana: A Review of the Life of John B. Gough (Boston, 1846), 20.
40
however, was not to appear in public until 1847, when Snelling became the editor of the Boston
Herald. In his “supplements” to Gough’s autobiography, Snelling revealed the “true” story of
Gough’s past: the first woman whom Gough married in Newburyport, MA and of whose virtue
he praised in his early days was a strumpet and a quadroon (being a quarter African); and Gough
was drawn to alcohol not because of the “bad company” of men but because of his own
miserable cuckoldry. Not only was Gough emasculated in the story, but even his whiteness was
challenged.
Snelling was capable of the profane, but his observation was nonetheless keen. He knew
that not all would be persuaded by a mundane test of probability, and that “there are none so hard
to convince as those who are determined to resist conviction.” “Though miracles have ceased,”
he observed: “faith in them has not.” Gough’s success (and the success of the temperance
societies in general in the 1840s) had represented for many the sea change of public morality that
would herald the Second Coming. And the reformers could not give up on Gough now, Snelling
argued, “for their craft was in danger…and above all, it must be painful, it must be humiliating,
to those who have been paying all but divine worship to Mr. Gough, for more than two years, to
feel and to acknowledge that they have so long been the dupes and fools of a sensual, dishonest,
abandoned young man.” 85
Snelling touched the heart of the matter. The scandal was not just Gough’s ordeal; it had
certainly put the respectability and moral leadership of the evangelical reformers on trial. The
question was no longer whether the apostle had indeed fallen, but whether his friends and
supporters could afford to let him fall. A sense of hesitation was palpable in the initial responses
85
Snelling, Goffiana, 22.
41
of the moral press to Gough’s fantastical drugging story. David Hale of the Journal of Commerce
set the tone for the moral press:
Evidently he (Gough) has met with sad treatment, either from himself or others. If from
others, the whole affair must be probed to the bottom, and the authors of the villainy
condignly punished. If from himself, his fall would seem, from the above account to have
resulted from some vile admixture in the soda water, which bereft him of reason and selfcontrol, and made him a prey to his old, but long suppressed appetite for strong drink. In
either case, he is much to be pitied.
Anticipating the worst scenario, he added:
Even if he were the sole author of his misfortunes, and had fallen like Lucifer to rise no
more, there would still remain this consoling fact, that a good cause does not fall with those
who profess and advocate it; and above all, does not depend upon the constancy of any one
individual. 86
The moral press may have been predisposed to accept the drugging story and to plead for
sympathy for a victim. But the extent of their faith in Gough may be measured by how much
they wanted to insure themselves against Gough’s apostasy and by disentangling his fate from
the temperance cause – a connection that the opposition press was quick to form.
None was more guarded in their response than the Boston Daily Mail. “[I]t is a favorable
symptom,” they remarked: “that those who know him [Gough] personally the best are most
ready to believe it; while those least willing to believe it, are the open and undisguised enemies
of the temperance cause.” But the Mail refused to be committed to Gough’s story once and for
all:
For our own part, we may say in all sincerity that we do not know what to think of it. It is
hard to believe that a man would thus solemnly call on heaven to judge him as he uttered
falsehood or truth, and still utter a lie- for it would constitute the rankest moral perjury. It is
almost as hard to believe that any man or set of men could possess so much of the fiend, as
to conspire deliberately for the downfall of a man who, in all his relations, has evinced the
kindest and most forgiving spirit. These conflicts in the philosophy of morals, in making up
a decision, render the case a peculiar one. 87
86
New York Journal of Commerce, Sept. 13, 1845.
87
Boston Daily Mail, n.d., in News Clippings Folio Vol. 2, p. 12, Gough Papers.
42
While the editors of the Mail were seemingly caught in a moral dilemma, others reacted
more positively in favor of Gough. Benjamin Webb Williams, editor of the Taunton Dew Drop,
for one, immediately expressed his faith in the drugging story and Gough’s innocence: “We are
aware that we differ from most persons in this vicinity in the above opinion, but we have our
reasons for it, and we shall adhere to it until the contrary has been proved.” “We do not pretend
to say that there has been no reason to fear the fall of this eloquent advocate of our cause,” he
maintained, “but we complain of the want of charity on the part of many persons.” The skeptics
and the denouncers of Gough, he complained, were all “enemies to the cause; wine drinkers,
brandy drinkers, apologizers for temperance [i.e. moderation], rumsellers and their supporters
and coadjutors.” 88
The labored, circuitous, and sometimes opportunistic defense betrayed the general
confusion, if not panic, within the moral press in the immediate aftermath of the scandal and the
unspoken fear of Gough’s apostasy. As Snelling pointed out, Gough’s fame was not entirely of
his own making. The moral press had exalted him and raved about his lectures. Churches had
opened their doors to him. Reform societies and their leaders had embraced him as their own.
Gough had drawn enormous crowds, publicity, and revenue to the cause of temperance reform.
Even as they tried to disconnect Gough’s fall from the temperance movement, they readily
branded the skeptics and the outright disbelievers of the drugging story as “enemies to the
cause.” They admitted, unwittingly perhaps, that Gough’s fate was indeed tied up with the
movement and that to be anti-Gough was to be anti-temperance. The denial of his fall (especially
the silent treatment of the obvious issue of illicit sex), despite the alleged disconnect between the
88
Taunton (MA) Dew Drop, n.d., in News Clippings Folio Vol. 2, pp. 18, 26, Gough Papers.
43
individual and the cause, served to protect the reform agenda, to save the face of many, and
perhaps to forestall what might trigger a general collapse of the moral and social order.
Gough’s supporters dismissed the objections raised by Wilkes and Snelling as mere cavils.
They argued that Gough’s wavering and inconsistent statement of facts could only be taken as
corroboration of his unstable state of mind. “What weight is to be attached,” Leander Streeter of
the Boston Daily Star asked: “to the wild exclamations of a man, thus fearfully prostrated in
body, and wandering in mind- barely living, and incapable of intelligent thought?” To the
questions about the potency of that cup of drugged soda water, David Hale answered, relying on
the authority of those “versed in the arts of crime,” that such drugging was not only probable, but
“common.” “But,” he maintained: “this does not seem to us a point of vast importance, though
of much interest.”
The point of importance was, rather, the editorial style of the anti-Gough articles. Streeter took
exception to the “spirit and temper shown” in the Police Gazette’s “exposure,” as much as their
argument:
If the object be simple justice, the tone should be candid and serious. But there is a
flippancy, a revolting facetiousness, and a labored dressing up of the case, that looks
more like a wish to write a “taking” article, with some dash of acrimony, than any care
for right and justice.
Streeter accused Wilkes of sensationalism and profiteering, although he may have been guilty of
the same. He charged that Wilkes’ reportage was not serious journalism and his “effort at
facetiousness, which jars chillingly on the feelings” undercut the credibility of his argument. 89
Streeter was alarmed, because the Gazette editors, and others like them, flouted the
etiquette of sincerity and the ritual and discourse of sympathy, in which the moral press had
89
New York Journal of Commerce, n.d and Boston Daily Star, n.d., “The Case of Mr. Gough” in
News Clippings Folio Vol. 2, pp. 4, 23, Gough Papers.
44
invited/instructed the public to participate.90 Not only did Wilkes and Snelling gloat over
Gough’s fall but they sought to enlarge upon and profit from it. 91 Streeter was worried about the
seductive (“pornographic”) influence of the counter narrative. He accused Wilkes of “feeding a
diseased public taste” by printing in the same issue a woodcut of a famous murder scene with the
killer (Tirrell) slashing the throat of his victim (Mrs. Bickford) with a razor. For Streeter, the key
issue in the scandal was not so much a test of the probability of facts but a battle of the “better
nature against the darker mistrusts and doubts of man’s heart.” 92
A common strategy employed by the reformers in this battle over the heart was the
demonization off their enemies. The Massachusetts Temperance Standard attributed Gough’s
drugging to “one of those demons in human form, that prowl about our cities to ruin and destroy
their fellow-men.” A poem in the Massachusetts Cataract described the culprit as the devil
incarnate. The Olive Branch felt ashamed of anyone “who derides when he should pity; for he
hath exchanged the sympathies of a man, for the cruel mockeries of a demon.” Horace Greeley
compared his rival, James Gordon Bennett, to the Faustian demon, Mephistopheles, who “cannot
repress his deep and solid joy at the opportunity of giving a stab at Temperance and the general
progress of Morality.” 93
90
These coagulated as the outward marks of respectability in the 1840s. Karen Halttunen,
Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870
(New Haven, 1982), 153.
91
They were what historian Richard Stott would call “jolly fellows” and they testified to the
existence of a “jolly” culture outside the pale of the cult of sensibility. Richard Stott, Jolly
Fellows: Male Milieu in Nineteenth-Century America (Baltimore, 2009).
92
Boston Daily Star, n.d., “The Case of Mr. Gough,” in News Clippings Folio Vol. 2, p. 23,
Gough Papers.
93
Massachusetts Temperance Standard (Boston, MA); Massachusetts Cataract (Worcester, MA);
Olive Branch (Halifax, Canada); New York Tribune in News Clippings Folio Vol. 2, pp.1, 13,
Gough Papers.
45
The repeated allusions to the demon or the devil cannot be taken at face value. The
evangelical reformers who supported Gough were not Puritans who may have found the Devil
elusive in form but substantive in its influence on the human heart. Few would come forward in
public to vouch for the existence and real power of the devil in the 1840s without becoming the
butt of a joke. Defending Benjamin Webb Williams, editor of the Taunton Dew Drop who wrote
a libelous short story titled “A Dream” in a trial for libel, Henry B. Stanton, the attorney and
leading reformer, insisted that the devil, demons, and the “house of human slaughter” that
readers would encounter in the story were “figurative expressions” (what we would call “literary
tropes”) rather than a literal description of the plaintiff’s grocery store and its occupants. 94 To
demonize one’s enemy was less about incarnating evil than about the need to externalize and bar
evil from respectable society by mid-century; it reflected the ascendance of the self and selfmaking (the imputation of sin onto one’s “others”) and the “moral nervousness” of the liberal
humanitarians at the presence of moral corruption within. 95
Indeed, the demonization of Gough’s enemies served to demarcate the boundary between
the adherents of the cult of sensibility and the outsiders. “Much fiendish joy and exultation has it
doubtless caused in the breasts of those who watch and wait for the downfall of the reformed and
the reformer, but to us,” the ladies of the Temperance Union of Philadelphia spoke emphatically:
“it came bearing deep and heartfelt grief.” To Dr. Mosely, Gough’s physician and caregiver in
Virginia whom they had never met in person, the Philadelphia ladies wrote: “but we are not
strangers, for in many respects the same feelings and sympathies actuate and warm our hearts -
94
B. W. Williams, Report of the Trial of B. W. Williams and Others (Taunton, MA, 1846), 34.
95
Andrew Delbanco, The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil (New
York, 1995), 96, 107.
46
those whom we mutually know and love, seem to form a connecting link between us.” 96
Asserting the emotional distance between “us” and the fiendish “them,” as well as the
“connecting link” between the friends of Gough, under the particular circumstances of the
scandal, became a way of self-display and an opportunity to clarify one’s social and cultural
identity. Gough’s scandal was, in fact, a class-defining moment wherein men and women made
conscious choices and public declarations of their social belonging and cultural allegiance and
when the “natural” effusion of noble sentiments became blurred with self-display. Admittedly,
the Philadelphia ladies used the opportunity to ease into the public sphere (as they did in
petitioning the state legislature to end liquor licensing), but it is also important that this was
achieved in a way that was pre-approved and endorsed by male reformers like Rev. John
Chambers and Rev. John Marsh, who held a rather constrictive view about women’s independent
public role but found nothing inappropriate in the extension of their traditional moral influence. 97
The “moral nervousness” of Gough’s male supporters was demonstrated nowhere more plainly
96
“John B. Gough and the Ladies,” (Boston Daily Atlas, n.d.) and “For the Inquirer” in News
Clipping Folio Vol.2, p. 16, 68, Gough Papers.
97
Mary Ryan’s work, Women in Public, represents the recent feminist efforts to challenge the
separate spheres (public men and private women) theory and to recover the different roles that
women had played in the 19th century “public sphere.” Historians Jean Gould Hales, Judith A.
Hunter, and Bruce Dorsey, for example, have all emphasized the “public” value of women’s
domestic virtues and suggested a connection between these socially approved civic activities of
women and the latter-day political struggle for women’s suffrage and for gender equality.
Though I agree fully that women (conservative or radical) had always had a voice in the public
sphere, we should not mistake their presence for shared interest and agenda. Gough’s women
supporters were not abolitionists like Maria Weston Chapman, or women’s rightists like
Elizabeth Cady Stanton (and they need not be); and they went as far as they deemed appropriate
for their social class and family. See Mary P. Ryan, Women in Public: Between Banners and
Ballots (Baltimore, 1990); Jean Gould Hales, “‘Co-Laborers in the Cause’: Women in the Antebellum Nativist Movement,” Civil War History 25, no. 2 (June, 1979); Judith A. Hunter,
“Beyond Pluralism: The Political Culture of Nativism in Philadelphia” (Ph.D. diss., Yale
University, 1999); Bruce Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women: Gender in the Antebellum City
(Ithaca, 2002).
47
than in the effort to foreground bourgeois women (and children) as moral pillars of society (as
they were thought to be morally untainted by virtue of their being detached from the marketplace)
and it was accentuated by the all-important but ever-blurry line between sincerity and hypocrisy
and between the innate disposition and the outward performance of sensibility. 98
Humbug
Nothing could have laid bare the inherent tension in the cult of sensibility more clearly than the
hoaxes inspired by the scandal. A “confession” appeared in the respectable New York Journal of
Commerce, on Monday morning, September 22, 1845, purported to be an excerpt from the
“Temperance Record Extra” (no such paper existed) containing a contrite speech Gough had
made in front of a “committee of Washingtonians” on the previous Saturday in Roxbury, MA. In
this “confession,” Gough exempted others from wrong-doing and admitted to having knowingly
taken soda water mixed with Lucina Cordial (an alcoholic aphrodisiac) in a “little edifice” on
Center and Reade “of unique construction, being made up principally of gas lights.” The drink
kindled in him the “most intense desire for women and wine.” At “Lothian’s corner” (a beer
parlor owned by Napier Lothian 99 at the corner of Center and Walker Streets), he ran into a
young woman, “an acquaintance of some years’ standing,” and followed her into a house with
the most charitable purpose of redeeming a “fallen sister” of hers (“although [himself] standing
on the precipice that overhung the vortex”). There, he drank himself into oblivion. Gough
insisted that his fall should not be attributed to the inefficacy of the pledge or concluded as the
failure of the temperance movement, but should be taken as evidence of the strength of the
98
The paradox is one of the central themes of Karen Halttunen’s Confidence Men and Painted
Women(New Haven, 1982).
99
Napier Lothian was listed as owner of a “porterhouse” on 109 Walker Street in Doggett’s
New-York City Directory for 1845 (New York, 1845). He was also a conductor for the New York
Brass Band.
48
drunkard’s appetite and as a warning for all. He prayed for God’s deliverance, asked for
forgiveness from his Washingtonian brethrens, and closed with a vow to return to the platform to
continue the fight against King Alcohol “with all my wounds and bruises upon me.” 100
The “confession” was followed the next day by a terse and seemingly nonchalant note from
David Hale, the editor of the New York Journal of Commerce, who pronounced the article a
“forgery” and identified its author as George Washington Dixon, the editor of a racy weekly,
New York Packet. 101 But the damage was already done. The “confession” was faithfully copied
by several respectable New York papers (including the New York Express and Evening Post) and
quickly spread across the nation (re-printed in the Philadelphia Gazette, the North American, the
Public Ledger, the Hartford Times and Courant, the Baltimore Sun, and the Barre Gazette, and
the Raleigh [NC] Register, etc.). A few papers, according to the Boston Daily Sun, printed the
“confession” and sold thousands of copies, knowing that the whole thing was a hoax. 102 But
other editors like David Hale were obviously hoodwinked. The New York Evening Post lent
credence to the “confession”: “We believe the statement made by him is true, for the shop at
which the soda water was procured, is doubtless the place where the article spoken of him
[Lucina Cordial] could be obtained.” 103 The Barre Gazette considered the style of the
“confession” “warm and glowing.” 104 The Brooklyn Eagle, who had “abstained from” comment
100
New York Journal of Commerce, Sept. 22, 1845.
101
New York Journal of Commerce, Sept. 23, 1845.
102
Boston Daily Sun, n.d., “Beware of Humbug ‘Confessions’,” in News Clippings Folio Vol. 2,
p. 7, Gough Papers.
103
New York Evening Post, Sept. 22, 1845.
104
Barre (MA) Gazette, Sept. 26, 1845.
49
in order to wait for Gough’s “own version of the story,” printed the “confession” in full followed
by approbation and forgiveness:
It [the “confession”] has the semblance of candor; and, if the facts are to be relied upon,
must go far to shield Mr. Gough from the censure that might otherwise fall upon him. We
all know- or can, at least, imagine- how terrible is the conflict between an inherent sense of
right and the long repressed but unextinguished appetite for strong drink; and while we
accord all praise to him who nobly resists the Tempter and comes off victorious at last, we
should always be ready to extend the hand of charity and forgiveness to those who fall by
the way, provided they manifest a sincere contrition for past errors, and a determination to
avoid them in future. 105
The pro-reform papers were thus deeply humiliated when the truth came out. The Brooklyn
Eagle, forgetting their endorsement of the “confession” just a few days before, felt vindicated in
their “doubts” over the article’s authenticity because of the absence of the drugging story. 106
William Cullen Bryant, the editor of the Evening Post, blamed his faux pas on his assistant who,
allegedly in his absence, copied the “confession” from the Journal of Commerce without reading
it through (But obviously, whoever reprinted the “confession” must have read the thing through
and through, given the comment on Lucina Cordial). Dixon, the mastermind of the hoax,
naturally bore the brunt of their anger. The Evening Post dubbed him “a worthless fellow who
pollutes the city by his presence.” 107 The Christian Freeman called him “an irredeemable
scoundrel, who has been so often kicked and horsewhipped, that he was at length become as
callous physically, as he long has been morally.” “It is a pity,” the editor lamented: “that such
moral pests contrive to cheat Justice of her dues and keep themselves outside of the
Penitentiary.” 108
105
Brooklyn (NY) Daily Eagle, Sept. 19, 22, 1845.
106
Ibid., Sept. 26, 1845.
107
New York Evening Post, Sept. 23, 1845.
108
Christian Freeman (Hartford, CT), n.d., in News Clippings Folio Vol. 2, p. 15, Gough Papers.
50
Dixon was a man of many talents and many (including legal) troubles. He was an early
black minstrel, a popular comic (“buffo”) singer-orator and songwriter, and editor of several
short-lived weekly papers (including the Polyanthos) of dubious reputation. He also dabbled in
animal magnetism, spiritualism, and performed such (Sam-Patch-style) feats as power-walking
sixty miles between Philadelphia and Trenton in twelve hours or pacing on a board non-stop for
sixty hours. He had been arraigned multiple times on forgery and libel charges and had managed
to clear himself every time until 1839, when under clouded circumstances he pled guilty to a
charge of libel against an Episcopal minister (of the latter’s sexual transgression) and spent six
months in the state penitentiary on Blackwell’s Island. Frequently sued in court or assaulted on
streets, Dixon was ever ready to defend himself with his pen (or his gun). 109
To the bombardment of the moral press, Dixon responded slyly that in committing the
forgery he was merely answering the request of Gough’s friends to “create a sympathy among
the friends as well as the foes of Temperance.” He claimed to be impervious to the personal
attacks of the moral press and confident in his superior prowess:
The abuse heaped upon us by two or three hair-brained paper-stainers of the press bounds
off like hail pelting on a zinc roof; we shall, ere long, send their chicken home to roost, the
fighting fowls will have their spurs on. So be prepared, both great and small, Tray, Blanch,
and Sweetheart, little dogs and all. 110
109
Dixon belonged to the same class of satirical writers as Snelling and Wilkes, and his life and
career showed many surprising resemblances to Gough’s. Gough was also a gifted singer and
orator, a prankster, and was said to have played black minstrel. Dixon responded to attempts at
whipping him in the street by carrying a gun with him and standing boldly up to the challenge.
For his colorful life, see Patricia C. Cohen, The Flash Press, 37-40, 113-114, and Dale Cockrell,
Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World (Cambridge, England and New
York, NY, 1997), 137.
110
New York Packet, n.d., “Gough Confession” in News Clippings Folio Vol. 2, p. 7, Gough
Papers.
51
For a professional prankster, forgery was his stock-in-trade, but this time he succeeded to a
greater extent than he had expected or perhaps realized. His prank fooled pro-Gough editors (and
presumably some readers) and made them the butt of a national joke. The unthinking acceptance
of the “confession” showed their eagerness, if not their naïveté, to embrace any story from
Gough, provided that it was endowed with “proper” sentiments and moral lessons (and that it
stopped short of illicit sex). Above all, the “credibility” of the forgery, with its “semblance” of
“warmth” and “candor,” brought into focus the formulaic quality of the sentimental discourse
and the disconnect between the outward form of sincerity and inner virtue. The “confession”
touched a raw nerve, highlighting the inherent contradictions within the cult of sincerity.
The prank also had unintended consequences for the reform community. It was no
coincidence that Gough dated his “official” statement Monday, September 22, the day when the
“confession” first appeared in the Journal of Commerce. In fact, it was probably the forged
“confession” that had prompted the preparation and release of Gough’s “official” statement.
Ironically, it was the forged “confession” rather than the “official” statement that had turned
public opinion within the reform circles decidedly in favor of Gough. If the pro-reform press had
been somewhat hesitant in backing Gough initially, they now came to realize the urgency of
decided action and a united front in regulating public discourse. Dixon’s forgery and their
fumbling over it made it all the more imperative for them to stick with Gough and his “official”
statement. More papers now openly endorsed the drugging story than ever, especially those who
had been duped into publishing the forgery. The “confession,” in effect, helped rally the protemperance press and their readers.
Yet a greater portion of the readers of the “confession” must have had a good laugh over
the hoax with Dixon. The readers of the New York Packet certainly could not have been fooled
52
by the joke. They knew what Lucina Cordial was and they saw it advertised for sale in the
Packet (to be obtained at Dixon’s office). The “confession” was a clever ad for Dixon’s
aphrodisiac, which knowledge was also the key (at least one of the many) to unravel the hoax.
The readers “in the know” laughed at Dixon’s jabs at Gough’s stagey mannerism, 111 his
affectation and hypocritical speech, as intended by Dixon. Then they probably had a second
laugh over those who had fallen for the hoax. The “humbug” was intended to deceive as well as
to amuse, depending on the audience; it was meant to separate sheep from goats.
A more elaborate hoax was circulated, shortly after Gough was found, in the form of a
pamphlet published and “copyrighted” in New York by Lewis C. Donald (pseud.), purporting to
be a “minute and authentic account” of Gough’s sojourn in Walker Street. With much gravity,
the author explained that he knew the “moral responsibility” of releasing such an account and he
only did it after he had “gained the confidence” of the women in his interview and made sure that
their story was worthy of “implicit confidence.” To show his objectivity, he claimed to have
published the account “without comment” and he left it to the reader “to decide whether it is just
and proper for these facts to be made known.” 112
111
Dixon borrowed the language of sensational journalistic reports about Gough’s lectures:
“Indeed, (said the speaker, much affected and leaning against the wall,) I am not well! [No
language could convey to the reader an idea of the tone in which these last words were uttered,
nor of the thrilling effect that they had upon his auditors.]” See Gough’s “Confession” in New
York Journal of Commerce, Sept. 22, 1845.
112
Anon., A Minute and Authentic Narrative of the Conduct and Conversation of John B. Gough,
During Each Day of His Late Absence, as Related by the Inmates of the House at Which He
Stopped (New York, 1845), 3. The publisher threatened to prosecute violation of his copyright
owing to the “pain and expense” involved in collecting the facts, but his name and the copyright
itself were most likely a hoax. I have gone through the publisher records at the AAS and
searched in newspapers and city directories and censuses without finding a match. It is unclear
how many editions the pamphlet had gone through, but it evidently had made wide circulation
and was for sale in major cities on the eastern seaboard. The Baltimore Daily Courant reported it
for sale in the city, in News Clippings Folio Vol. 2, p. 15, Gough Papers. Princeton Library has a
copy, as well as the New York Historical Society (owned by C. A. Morse).
53
The account appears to be in keeping with the report in the moral press that denied sexual
indiscretion in the affair by “ascertaining” the innocent character of the house (that it was
occupied by seamstresses, not prostitutes). 113 In his interview with the women, the author
claimed to have seen nothing “unbecoming.” They were all honest and decent women. A middleaged widow kept the house with her eight-year old daughter and had two female boarders, who
worked as seamstresses. 114 The house itself was “neat and orderly” and nothing like a low
bordello. Gough was well treated by the women in the account. Though by turns cheerful and
melancholy during his stay, Gough was always courteous, kind, and generous with all. It appears
at first glance that the author of the pamphlet had sided with the moral press and had cleared
Gough of the most egregious crime of sexual misconduct. At least, that is what Cyrus E. Morse,
one of Gough’s close associates, had allegedly been led to believe.
But like Dixon’s “confession,” the “minute and authentic” account was an elaborate
confidence game. Having reassured the reader by disclaiming illicit sex, the author turned around
to give incriminating details, showing day by day that Gough was conscious and sensible. He
knew he was in Walker Street and was in control of himself, except over brandy and oysters.
This was a direct refutation of Gough’s insanity defense. On a closer look, the narrative was full
of sly sarcasm and mockery beneath the tone of gravity and objectivity. True to his mission as a
113
New York Journal of Commerce, Sept.16, 1845: “The house in Walker Street, where he was
found, was visited on Saturday by two of his friends, accompanied by Mr. Hays. It is a small
house, and occupied by a woman of middle age and two young women. They were occupied
with their needles, and their appearance indicated that they were accustomed to be so occupied”;
a report to that effect was also read at the Massachusetts State Temperance Convention in 1845.
See Massachusetts Temperance Standard, n.d., in News Clippings Folio Vol. 2, p. 6, Gough
Papers.
114
They were a young widow “of handsome form and features, whose countenance, though
naturally mild and pleasant, often wears an air of engaging sadness,” and an orphan girl “of
modest manners and retired disposition, and whose history is of intense interest.” See A Minute
and Authentic Narrative, 4.
54
reformer, Gough repeatedly urged piety and total abstinence on the women during his stay, while
drinking brandy at intervals. He was “cut to the heart” when his exhortation was not heeded.
Praising Croton water as the “best drink in the world,” he threw up after drinking it. Speaking of
temperance lectures, Gough opined that they “should not be delivered for money but that they
should be free for all both rich and poor,” while it was pointed out that his last lecture at the
Tabernacle charged 50 cents per head at the door. He was tearful when speaking about poor
orphans and abused wives, lamenting the hardship boys underwent at the House of Refuge
(chaired, incidentally, by his sponsor Moses Grant) for “having their hair cropped” (Gough was
famous for his long flowing hair). He displayed his magnanimity, which bordered on
extravagance, by frequently bestowing gifts of two to five dollars on the women in exchange for
favors and paying generously for his room and board. He showered kindness on a kitten in the
house, feeding it oysters and paying 50 cents for its board, and he made a humanitarian speech
on the occasion against the mistreatment of “dumb animals.” He was careful about personal
hygiene (repeatedly saying that “he was accustomed to bathe every day”) and when asked when
he bathed last, he recalled that it was on Saturday when he went back to his hotel to change his
clothes (thus giving the lie to his story that he was confined to the house from Friday till he was
found). 115
The account may have cleared Gough of one charge (that of sexual misdemeanor) 116 but
landed him squarely in another (that of deceit and fraud). It was serious and objective on the
surface, but sly and pungent underneath. It was a cleverly-concealed satire of not only Gough
115
Ibid.
116
Even this is doubtful in the end, considering that the household arrangement (with an elder
woman keeping a house of several single young women) was rather common for a house of
assignation, and seamstress was often used as a cover for prostitution.
55
and his sponsors, but the entire evangelical humanitarian enterprise (temperance, anti-animalcruelty, orphan care, etc.) and urban improvement projects (such as the Croton Aqueduct).
Moreover, it mocked bourgeois sensibility and lifestyle, which Gough feigned to adopt (piety
and personal hygiene being marks of respectability), and it criticized police rascality (in their
stealing the money Gough gave the young widow).
The “confession” and the “minute and authentic” account were both great humbugs that
created the illusion of authenticity by imitating the respectable language and sentiments and by
playing with taboos. Students of P. T. Barnum the showman and his curious exhibitions tend to
emphasize the “therapeutic” values of illusion and the “democratic” (and even modernizing)
potentials of the audience’s play with fraud. Neil Harris argues that the Barnumesque humbugs
catered to Jacksonian Americans’ interest in figuring out the operation of things including the
getting-up of hoaxes, and that Barnum’s exhibits provided “harmless pleasure” (a diversion from
more egregious sins) and vindicated the persistence of confidence in a market society. James W.
Cook suggests that playing with fraud entailed a “democratic duty of judgment” and gave a
“democratic delight of choice” and a “democratic satisfaction of participating in public life.” He
even argues that commercial humbugs trained people in a modern and “sophisticated” consumer
mentality - that they learned to evaluate not only the moral but the pecuniary (i.e. entertaining)
value of the show. 117
The humbugs over Gough’s scandal were somewhat different. They were certainly not
very therapeutic: the humbugs caused discomfort and embarrassment among the reformers. They
gave every reader an opportunity to make up their mind about the authenticity of the publication
117
Neil Harris, Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum (Boston, 1973), Chapters 3 and 8; James W.
Cook, The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum (Cambridge, MA, 2001),
76.
56
and about the scandal, though not every reader was equally well-informed about the operations
of the New York underworld. The “democratic” choice brought on public humiliation for some
and irrepressible mirth for others, and it did not so much acculturate people to a democratic
consumer culture, but separated and differentiated them according to their inclination and social
background. In other words, the humbugs concerning moral reform were more than commercial
entertainment. They became politicized. They subverted the humanitarian discourse, confused
moral judgment, and gave vent to (indirectly perhaps) the populist resentment against
evangelical reform.
Some scholars argue that moral ambiguity helped explain Gough’s appeal, and that
Gough was, in essence, another Barnum or Barnumesque exhibit. 118 This is true to a certain
degree, especially in the immediate aftermath of the scandal, when people crowded temperance
lectures to hear Gough defend himself. But we should not confuse temporary effect with original
intent. Gough was not supposed to be Barnum (at least not in the 1840s). Sincerity, not profit,
was believed to be the foundation of the moral enterprise and the prerequisite of temperance
advocacy. Gough’s special power in moving his audience was owing to his “realistic” portrayal
of the devastating effects of drinking and the “natural” effusion of “unaffected” emotions (see Ch.
III), to his giving certainty and hope of reformation, rather than leaving his audience to doubts
and guesses.
Gough’s friends and supporters surely did not revel in the kind of “marketing
opportunity” the scandal created; rather, they were deeply anxious and alarmed because the
humbugs showed plainly that sincerity could be faked and would be believed. Their
118
For example, Graham Warder, “Selling Sobriety: How Temperance Reshaped Culture in
Antebellum America,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 2000) and Amy
Hughes, Spectacles of Reform: Theater and Activism in Nineteenth-Century America (Ann Arbor,
2012).
57
defensiveness on the subject and their unity of action in endorsing the “official statement” vis-àvis the “confession” reflected a heightened sense of moral nervousness and vulnerability and
represented an effort to shore up the sincerity of reform and reformers rather than to turn the
controversy into profit. And yet their endeavor was no doubt complicated by their adoption of
new Barnumesque measures in sustaining and furthering the temperance enterprise financially,
and their trouble was compounded by the criticism issuing from within the temperance and
religious communities.
A War inside the Temperance Party
“There bids fair to be considerable of a war among the friends and foes of John B. Gough, in the
temperance party, on the matter of personal credibility,” the Worcester (MA) Palladium
observed, “the last performer on the Anti-Gough side of the house, is a Mr. Goodhue.” 119
Benjamin S. Goodhue was a varnish maker from Massachusetts and a part-time temperance
lecturer. He used to share a platform with Gough, but did not become a professional lecturer like
the latter. Like many locally-based Washingtonian speakers, he spoke in his spare time and
mostly to local audiences in the vicinity. 120 Until Gough’s scandal, his name was perhaps not
known beyond a few coastal towns of Connecticut, where he had moved with his family in or
around 1844. In a way, the scandal gave him a chance to bid for national fame. Like many
anonymous protesters against Gough’s comeback, Goodhue was not convinced by Gough’s
drugging story, but unlike others and probably against the advice of his wife, he chose to launch
119
Worcester (MA) Palladium quoted in Barre (MA) Patriot, Jan. 23, 1846.
120
It is not clear if Goodhue had always spoken free of charge, but he did not charge anything for
his speech about Gough’s scandal at the Universalist meeting house, even though his public
letter against Gough was being sold at the door.
58
an open attack using his real name and gave the lie direct to Gough and his friends, and he
picked no less a paper to do this than the National Police Gazette. 121
On January 17, 1846, a lengthy letter from Goodhue was published in the Police Gazette,
accusing Gough and his friends of lying and committing fraud. Goodhue’s main charges were
three: Firstly, he testified to having caught Gough drinking brandy (which Gough later claimed
to be a phial of prescribed medicine) when they were lecturing in Charlton, MA in April 1843.
Secondly, he accused Gough’s close associates of doctoring the report on the scandal, which was
delivered at the Washingtonian Temperance Convention in Worcester on September 16th, 1845,
presumably, to preempt any discussion of illicit sex. 122 Lastly, he claimed to have conducted an
independent investigation with James Stockwell, owner of the temperance restaurant the Croton
Lunch and member of the local Sons of Temperance in New York City, and they ascertained
Gough’s sanity during his stay, his return to the Croton Hotel on Saturday, and his long history
of acquaintance with the keeper of the house in Walker Street. 123
The Goodhue letter was diligently circulated. It was copied into other papers and printed
separately for sale (reportedly being sold at a Goodhue lecture in New York). It was sent to
121
See Mrs. Goodhue’s reply to Gough’s letter of inquiry, in Boston Daily Star, Jan. 10, 1846. It
would have been difficult for the opponents of Gough to find mainstream temperance papers
willing to publish their attacks, and they had to turn to the popular press.
122
Apparently, Dr. A. Hunting was delegated by Gough’s friends to give a report at the
Convention. Cyrus E. Morse, Gough’s agent, had put together a report that he hoped to get
George Hurlbut, the president of the Brooklyn City Temperance Society, to sign. But Hurlbut
(along with George C. Ripley) may have stopped short of denying the well-known character of
the house, and he wrote up a separate, scaled-back statement. But then at the convention, the
reports were condensed, combined, and read as one, and of course, all C. E. Morse, Hurlbut, and
Ripley were named as authors in support of the drugging story and the innocent character of the
house.
123
They learned from the hotel clerk that Gough had returned to the Croton Hotel on Saturday
night, as shown by his signature at sign-in, and that Gough was conscious during his stay and
went out to get brandy for himself. National Police Gazette (New York, NY), Jan. 17, 1846.
59
ministers to influence their minds against Gough, creating obstacles for Gough’s return in a
number of towns. Rev. W. of Flushing, for instance, had requested “some setting right about the
matter” before he lent Gough his pulpit. 124
In New York, the Goodhue letter prompted nothing short of an open rebellion in the
temperance ranks. Prompted by the letter, dozens of Washingtonians, Sons of Temperance, and
Rechabites put down their names on cards of protest published in the New York True Sun and
openly broke ties with Gough and his friends. The temperance societies were divided against
themselves. Shortly after Peter MacDonald, the president of the Total Abstinence Caledonian B.
Society, published a protest on behalf of the society against Gough, William Tovee, 125 the
second vice president (a furniture seller and later a professional host of commercial boxing
matches), came out to defend Gough and claimed to speak for “the majority of the society.”
Indignant temperance men made their way into the New York Tabernacle packed with Gough
supporters for his much-anticipated return speech (though the meeting was announced for exMayor James Harper by the Daughters of Temperance), and they started hissing the lecturer
when he rose to speak and continued to do so amid his fans’ applauses, creating much vexation
for Gough and his friends (When Gough pleaded for a “fair field” and “honest men to deal with,”
one protester shouted back: “How about Goodhue?”). 126
124
Reported by Rev. Ezra Ely of Philadelphia, in unknown paper, “Gough Meeting,” News
Clippings Vol. 2, p. 50, Gough Papers, and also in Octavo Volume 10 “Record J. B. G.,” entry
dated Jan 20, 1846, Gough Papers.
125
In Elliott J. Gorn, The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting In America (Ithaca, NY,
1986), 273-4.
126
New York True Sun, Jan. 20, 27, 28, 29, 1846; New York Express, n.d., in News Clippings
Folio Vol. 2, p. 44, Gough Papers.
60
James Burnett, editor of the Rechabite journal, Crystal Fount, chided the protest for being
“out of place.” The publication of the cards of protest, he opined, “had a tendency to create a riot
and disturbance.” The hissers did not show deference to ex-Mayor Harper, when his very name
used for the meeting “should have been enough in itself to forbid any attempt at discord or a
breach of the peace.” They were, according to him, “individuals of the baser sort.”127
But the protesters were definitely not the tavern crowd. They were made up of leaders
and members of the local temperance fraternal societies, and the hissing was reportedly led by
Burnett’s fellow teetotal Rechabites, one of whom was said to be the chief ruler of a Rechabite
tent (i.e. a ward society) in the city. 128 They were the middling sorts. Of all the protestors whose
occupations could be ascertained, the majority was mechanics and shopkeepers (see Appendix
II). Printers and carpenters (each at 11% of the total number of protesters) headed the list (trailed
by bookbinders at 8%). There were two physicians and both were practitioners of unconventional
medicine. 129 The printers and physicians held leadership positions in local societies. Abraham D.
Wilson, a medical school graduate and an early convert to homeopathy, was the president of the
Marshall Total Abstinence Society. 130 Salmon Bronson, a Thomsonian physician, was the
secretary of the Catherine Street T. A. Association. Adam C. Flanagan, the president of the
Prospect Temperance Society, was a printer by trade. Same was Peter McDonald, the president
127
The Independent Order of Rechabites started as a workingman mutual assistance teetotal
society in England in 1835. See Crystal Fount and Rechabite Recorder (New York), Jan. 24,
1846.
128
Possibly Edward M. Osborn, the chief ruler of the Marine Tent in New York City.
129
In contrast, we know that the conventional medical establishment in Philadelphia supported
Gough.
130
Incidentally, Wilson lived and practiced at 42 Walker Street, not far from 113 Walker Street,
where Gough was found. Doggett’s New-York Directory for 1845 (New York, 1845).
61
of the T. A. Caledonian B Society. Both Wilson and Flanagan (as well as James Stockwell, the
keeper of the Croton Lunch) united with other mechanics and the evangelical bourgeois men
(Anson G. Phelps, John Marsh, David M. Reese, John W. Leavitt, and Horace Greeley) in
shoring up support for a local licensing bill, and it would seem that not all anti-Gough protestors
were averse to closing taverns by limiting or stopping liquor licensing. 131 Although moral
suasion versus legal prohibition had become a constant source of friction within the temperance
party by the mid-1840s, it was probably not the only or even the most important issue for the
anti-Gough faction. Rather, it was the new economics of the temperance movement and the
professionalization of temperance lecturing that had drawn the most fire. 132
In a widely circulated public letter (first published in the New England Washingtonian
and the Boston Times), Simon P. Hanscom, 133 a Washingtonian lecturer and a printer by trade,
protested against the secrecy and suspense surrounding Gough’s much-anticipated return to the
Boston stage (the plan was to smuggle him into a temperance meeting without public notice). 134
131
To be passed in the New York state legislature (except for New York City) in September
1845.
132
Names and occupations discussed are based on New York True Sun, Jan. 20, 27, 28, 29, 1846,
federal census records, and city directories.
133
Hanscom was an ardent abolitionist. He later became associated with the Free Soil paper, the
Commonwealth, and at the beginning of the Civil War, became a D.C. correspondent for the New
York Herald, and later editor of the National Republican (Washington, DC) and an avid
newsman and a lobbyist. For his biographical information, see George Adams, Boston Directory
(Boston, 1851); Anon., Boston Slave Riot and Trial of Anthony Burns (Boston, 1854), 40;
Benjamin Perley Poore, Perley’s Reminiscences of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis, (2
vols., Philadelphia, 1886) 2:194; Noah Brooks and Michael Burlingame, Lincoln Observed: Civil
War Dispatches of Noah Brooks (Baltimore, 1998), 245.
134
See Boston Times, Dec. 6, 1845; New England Washingtonian (Boston), Nov. 28, 1846. The
clue for the authorship of the Hanscom letter (which was published anonymously) is in New
England Washingtonian, n.d., “Letter From Fall River,” News Clippings Folio Vol. 2, p. 71-2,
Gough Papers. Although no one claimed responsibility for it, Gough’s return was clearly planned
and staged with care. No advertisement was given in advance for the lecture, and no official date
62
Gough’s friends were being deliberately evasive about the exact date of the lecturer’s
reappearance and when asked, a “gentleman” advised the inquirer to attend “every meeting” of
the society in order to hear Gough. “Are the public not to know when Mr. G. makes his
appearance?” Hanscom objected, “Or are the public, who are anxious to witness ‘his first
appearance,’ to be gulled by impressions of this kind in order that the pockets of certain
individuals may be filled, under that stereotyped garb of ‘6 1-4 or 12 1-2 cents in aid of the
cause?’” If Gough was afraid to lecture in public “duly noticed” as before, Hanscom insisted, he
should “go to work at his trade, and spend what spare time he has, like other reformed men, in
doing good in this city and vicinity, or any other place where he may in such case take up his
abode.” He must no longer “traverse this country over at the rate of ten, twenty, and twenty-five
dollars per night and expenses.” “[I]f he intends charging ‘admission fees,’ to the rum portion of
the community, to reform them,” Hanscom averred, “he may rest assured that such ‘gaming’
won’t ‘go down.’” As proof of Gough’s complicity in the pay scheme, Hanscom published a
letter written on behalf of the lecturer to the Fall River (MA) Washingtonian Society, which
demanded as the lecturer’s terms of engagement his “usual fee” (which in 1843 was $8 per
lecture, in 1844, $10, and in 1845 could be anywhere from $15 to $25 per lecture) as well as the
travel expenses for his entourage. 135
Hanscom’s letter brought up at least two sensitive issues central to the development of
professional temperance lecturing: the institution of the “pay meeting,” which charged standard
was set – probably for fear of organized opposition. Gough sneaked into an ongoing temperance
meeting held at Faneuil Hall on Thursday night, December 4, 1845 and was “loudly called for
and urged to speak.” See “John B. Gough,” News Clippings Folio Vol. 2, p. 18, Gough Papers.
135
Gough, of course, denied any knowledge of the letter, and J. H. Tallman submitted a letter to
New England Washingtonian in November 1846, confirming that those demands were authorized
by Gough and Moses Grant. See Boston Times, Dec. 6, 1845.
63
admission fees (6 ¼, 12 ½, 25, or 50 cents) at the door, and the soaring pay of a few star
temperance lecturers. Hanscom believed that charging admission fees for temperance meetings
(versus in-meeting collection and voluntary contribution) turned reform into a money-making
scheme, and worse, that the Boston temperance leaders appeared to be cashing in on the public
curiosity created by Gough’s scandal. He argued that pay meetings would turn away the very
people they hoped to reform. He called into question Gough’s exorbitant terms and the emerging
national temperance circuit that enabled full-time lecturers like Gough to make a living. In
essence, Hanscom was contesting the departure of temperance lecturing from its local and
voluntary origins and its assimilation into the professional “public lecturing system” in the mid1840s. 136
The rise of John B. Gough as a star speaker for the temperance movement was a central
story in the professionalization of temperance lecturing. Gough and his advisors (especially
Moses Grant, the leading organizer and financier for the Boston temperance movement) were
among the first to implement admission charges at temperance meetings, and Gough commanded
the highest pay of all temperance lecturers and enjoyed the widest fame. 137 Admittedly, the
incipient commercialism and the trappings of stardom were not unquestioned before in the
temperance movement, nor were Gough and his friends unaware of their vulnerable moral
136
On the “public lecturing system,” see Donald M. Scott, “The Popular Lecture and the
Creation of a Public in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America,” Journal of American History 66:4
(March 1980), pp. 791-809.
137
The first pay meeting I found was called by Moses Grant for Gough on the Christmas
Evening of 1843. See Boston Daily Atlas, Dec. 25, 1843. The earliest ads for pay meetings can
be traced back to Moses Grant and the Boston Total Abstinence Society (later the Massachusetts
State Temperance Society) under his charge; Gough’s lecture fee was $8 dollars per night in
1843, and it became $25 in 1845. See News Clippings Folio Vol. 2, p. 68, “Pay of Temperance
Lecturer,” Gough Papers.
64
position, but the scandal brought these issues into the limelight and made the lecturer’s pay an
attendant issue with his integrity. 138
While Gough and his friends had turned a deaf ear to the attacks against their business
practice, the scandal forced them to respond and to defend and justify the new developments in
temperance lecturing. Benjamin W. Williams, Gough’s loyal supporter and editor of the Taunton
Dew Drop, felt compelled to explain, in response to Hanscom’s letter, that the recent compulsory
payment of ten cents at the door of the Spring Street Church for Gough’s comeback lecture was
meant to cancel a debt incurred by “a few individuals,” who had previously been “responsible for
the use of the church at different times for lectures.” “The cause of temperance,” he argued,
“cannot, in any place, be successfully prosecuted without funds.” 139 The exasperated Norfolk
(VA) Daily Courier contended, over a chorus of objections to Gough’s visit after the scandal,
that the lecturer “CHARGES NOTHING for his services” and that an admission fee was
imposed to support the local temperance society, since its previous calls for help and
subscription had been “neglected” by the public. 140 In the wake of the scandal, Jesse W.
Goodrich of the Massachusetts Cataract had to defend charging admission at the door, as against
the traditional practice of “passing the hat.” He declared both ways of fundraising “perfectly
voluntary.” “[T]he only difference,” according to him, lay “in the proceeds, - the former being
generally of silver, and the latter, to a much greater extent, of the works of ‘Alexander the
138
See the earlier questioning of Gough’s admission fees, and also Gough’s earlier scruples
against lecturing with admission fees and his vulnerable moments, in Lynn (MA) Washingtonian,
n.d.; Olive Branch (Halifax, Canada), n.d.,“Letter to the Editor of the O. Branch”; and New
England Washingtonian (Boston, MA), n.d., in News Clippings Folio Vol. 1, Gough Papers.
139
“Mr. Gough in Taunton,” ca. Dec. 1845, News Clippings Folio Vol. 1, p. 22, Gough Papers.
140
“Mr. Gough – Temperance – Objections,” ca. Mar.-April 1846, News Clippings Folio Vol. 1,
p. 59, Gough Papers.
65
Coppersmith.’” He knew that a ticket collection at the door would come from “those optionally
entering the Hall” and would turn away the opponents of orthodox religion and reform. The real
difference that an admission fee made was that between a self-selected audience and a mixed
crowd. 141
To the repeated challenges against the lecturer’s pay after the scandal, Gough’s friends
and supporters responded with grand temperance festivals and benefits and a national
subscription drive for a “Gough Fund” of $20,000 in late 1846 to early 1847. They insisted that
Gough’s ability and his influence for moral reform should be commensurate with his pay. “If
there is any labor which deserves a fair remuneration,” they argued, “it is that which is devoted
to the cause of humanity and morals.” 142 Gough liked to think of his pay as gratuities voluntarily
given by his appreciative audience, rather than standard fees. 143 His friends insisted that he did
not solicit pay (in most cases, they did it for him 144 ), but his audience owed something to him
and they paid the admissions in order to “evince their respect for his character and zeal, and their
141
“John B. Gough in Worcester,” Massachusetts Cataract (Worcester, MA), Dec. 24, 1845,
News Clippings Folio Vol. 2, p. 38, Gough Papers.
142
“The Gough Fund,” News Clippings Folio Vol. 2, p. 82; and “The Gough Fund: A
Proposition to the American People,” p. 84, Gough Papers.
143
In reply to Hanscom’s letter, Gough declared at a meeting held in Fall River that “he did not
set a price for his labors, but left it with those among whom he labored to give him what they
saw fit.” See “Letter from Fall River,” News Clippings Folio Vol. 2, p. 72, Gough Papers.
144
Earlier, Moses Grant set the terms of pay for Gough at 8 dollars, but it increased rapidly. His
friends believed that he should be able to lay up $1,000 a year, and his friend, John H. Cocke in
Virginia, decided that $100 a week should be his minimum charge of each county (“the friends
of the cause could not consent to anything below $100”) and it should be given “without regard
to any solicitation, whatever, on his part.”
66
desire to advance his personal fortunes.” And if Gough was to be faulted for his receiving pay, it
seemed that those who freely gave it to him would also come in for a share of the blame. 145
The defense of admission charges and Gough’s pay was not only an attempt to shore up
Gough’s reputation at his most vulnerable moment, but it reflected deeper changes in the
temperance reform. The institution of pay meetings was indicative of the shifting target of
evangelical reform. Goodrich and other defenders of pay meetings were obviously not very keen
on getting the temperance message through to all but only to those who were already predisposed
to reform and willing and able to pay. They understood that a small admission charge would
likely turn away those who were indifferent or opposed to the temperance reform - they would
“regret” it but accept it as fact. The objection to admission fees was believed to be but a “paltry
excuse” for refusing to support the cause. They did not allow for financial difficulty (of the
impoverished drunkard, for instance) or ideological opposition. All criticism was written off,
especially in the aftermath of the scandal, as spite against the cause and all critics were
“croakers,” “faultfinders,” or “moderate or immoderate drinkers.” 146
The financial need often cited by temperance leaders in justifying pay meetings owed less
to the inadequacy of voluntary contribution than to the growing appetite of an expanded and
145
Leaflet for the “Gough Festival” (excerpt from the New York Courier and Enquirer), News
Clippings, Folio Vol. 2, p. 77: “He deserves well at their hands, and we hope he will not find
them ungrateful” and Taunton (MA) Dew Drop, News Clippings, Folio Vol. 2, p. 71: “He was
paid well, but was it his fault? We understood at the time, that the money was raised for him, and
if there is blame to be attached to any one we are ready to bear our share of it.” Gough Papers.
146
Worcester (MA) Cataract, Dec. 24, 1845. Norfolk (VA) Daily Courier, “the mouth of the ox
shall not be muzzled that treadth out the corn,” in News Clippings Folio Vol. 2, p. 59, Gough
Papers. The financial need often cited by temperance leaders in justifying pay meetings owed
less to the inadequacy of voluntary contribution than to the growing appetite of an expanded and
institutionalized temperance movement at mid-century. The proceeds from a well-managed and
well-attended course of lectures would result in a surplus for the salaries of directors, secretaries,
and agents and other various expenses of the society. In Gough and popular lecturers like him,
the temperance leaders had found an ally and a means to finance the movement.
67
institutionalized temperance movement at mid-century. The proceeds from a well-managed and
well-attended course of lectures would result in a surplus for the salaries of directors, secretaries,
and agents and other various expenses of the society. In Gough and popular lecturers like him,
the temperance leaders had found an ally and a means to finance the movement.
To be sure, Gough’s temperance opponents were not opposed to rewarding temperance
lecturers per se, but they contested the amount of pay and the new “business model” of the
temperance movement, using the scandal as an occasion for public debate. Citing the vast gap in
the pay of different temperance lecturers, they argued that instead of producing surpluses, star
lecturers drained community resources and impoverished other lesser known (but “honest and
devoted”) speakers for the cause, and that the enthusiasm created by itinerant star speakers
quickly dissipated, to be replaced by lethargy and indifference. 147 They believed that every moral
reformer should be “worthy of his hire” and was entitled to a “comfortable support,” 148 but both
the amount of Gough’s pay (at $100 per week in 1846) and the practice of selling tickets had
overstepped the boundary between benevolent reform and commercial enterprise and made him
liable to charges of mercenary motive and insincerity. Labor in the cause of benevolent reform,
however valuable it was to society, should not be rewarded “on the commercial principle.” 149
Gough’s friends clearly had a different idea about what a “fair remuneration” should be
for a moral reformer. They reaffirmed the compatibility of advancing a moral cause and
147
News Clippings Folio Vol. 2, p. 68, “Pay of Temperance Lecturer,” Gough Papers.
148
Ibid., “Every laborer is worthy of his hire, and from three to five dollars is little enough to pay
a man for lecturing one evening upon the subject of Temperance. Any thing over five dollars is
too much, and only tempts unprincipled and selfish men to advocate temperance for the sake of
the money, and anything under three dollars is too little, and only serves to keep competent men
out of the field, for the want of proper and justifiable remuneration.”
149
News Clippings Folio Vol. 2, p. 95, Gough Papers.
68
increasing material wealth, and yet they also tried to remove the taint of money-making by
dissociating the lecturer’s pay from the admission ticket (indeed, the creation of the “Gough
Fund” was supposed to obviate the need of charging admissions) and to re-conceptualize what
appeared to be a market relationship in terms of gift-giving (describing Gough’s money as a free
and voluntary gift from “the public”). In this light, the admission ticket became more than a
monetary contribution to the cause; it was a vote of confidence in its spokesman. Those who
chose to pay to hear Gough had bought into his rising stock of fame and became invested in his
present fall and his future career. 150
Sectarian Controversy
Gough’s scandal caused mixed responses in church circles. With a majority of the evangelicals
of the orthodox churches (New School Presbyterians and evangelical Congregationalists) on
Gough’s side, members and ministers of non-orthodox denominations and non-evangelical
persuasions kept their silence. But some did venture to speak out against Gough and his allies.
Curiously, they appeared to be more concerned than the protesting mechanics about upholding
the “true” Washingtonian principle of moral suasion and maintaining the non-sectarian character
of reform. While they shared the antipathy toward the commercialization of temperance lecturing,
they directed public attention to the men behind the curtain and to the audience in the pit, and
they demanded public rethinking of the “new measures” that carried over from Finneyite revivals
to moral reform.
George Gibbs Channing, a younger brother of Rev. William Ellery Channing and the
editor of the Unitarian denominational paper Christian World, earned himself strong
disapprobation by publishing a long anti-Gough epistle in his paper. The correspondent
150
We will discuss how Gough transformed these “gifts” for a moral reformer into the legitimate
earnings of a self-made man in Ch. IV.
69
attributed Gough’s apostasy to his abandonment of the Washingtonian brotherhood and his
betrayal of the “true” Washingtonian principle of moral suasion only for “that division of the
reform which is seeking moral conquests by the iron power of Law.” He suggested that the
lecturer’s fall was not entirely “by his own weight.” It was also owing to the “injudicious
kindness of his later friends,” ambitious moral reformers, who clung onto Gough’s popularity
and exploited his histrionic talent in hope of producing immediate victories. 151 Gough’s friends
depended too much on him and kept him “in the continued and morbid excitement of perpetual
public display.” They forgot about his past that “when but a boy he was the dramatis personae of
our ‘Lion Theatre’.” They “unconsciously” re-made his life “a spectacle, in which he was to bear
the only, the single part,” replacing one kind of stimulant (alcohol) for the drunkard with another
(excitement of the stage). To counteract the adverse effects of recent reform measures, the writer
advocated a strict separation of moral reform and legal action and recommended the reformed
drunkard’s “retirement” from public life and engagement in “physical labor” (instead of pledgesigning) as the “true and only remedy” for addiction. 152
Rev. Leonard Withington, minister of the First Congregational Church in Newbury, raised a
storm by airing his view (under the initials of L. W.) of the scandal in the Newburyport Daily
Herald (Five years before this, he authored a pamphlet attacking the Arminian tendency of the
“new measures” employed in the temperance movement, including the vogue of pledge-signing
151
It was with him “the tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood leads on to fortune.”
Christian World (Boston, MA), Sept. 20th, 1845.
152
Christian World (Boston, MA), Sept. 20, 1845.
70
and prohibitive legislation). 153 Rev. Withington objected to the recruitment of ex-drunkards as
temperance advocates and pointed to the underlying problem of public taste.
After all the protestations which have been made that a good cause ought not to suffer from
the frailty of its advocates, I am afraid, that when such doubtful measures are countenanced,
that neither the men employing such dangerous tools nor the credulous public who listen to
them, are wholly innocent.
The lecturer’s audience was as complicit in the sensationalization of temperance lecturing as
were his employers. The popularity of the theatrical style of reformed drunkards was due to “a
morbid taste that waits to be moved by such eloquence.” “[W]e have listened to the former
abominations of reformed drunkards, until we can relish no other eloquence.” The public’s
eagerness to hear sensational stories, in other words, helped elevate reformed drunkards like
Gough as public speakers, whose backsliding jeopardized the cause and more than erased
whatever temporary effect they created. 154
In a way, rationalist clergymen like Withington may have felt threatened by sensational
lecturers, who (along with the emotional preachers) competed with them for the public ear and
for moral influence. He voiced his concern through the mouth of a young minister, who was
reportedly “discouraged” in his preaching because he had no past sins to fall back on. Rev.
Withington expressed his “perplexity” about morality in the era of the Market Revolution. “But
in this age,” he lamented, not without bitterness, “nothing is more unpopular than past virtue.” 155
153
Leonard Withington, A Review of the Late Temperance Movement in Massachusetts (Boston,
1840). He criticized the Arminian tendency of pledge-signing and voluntary association, the
politicization of moral reform, and the infeasibility of enforcing any kind of prohibitive law. He
enjoined readers to follow their heads, not their hearts, and to use reason.
154
Newburyport (MA) Daily Herald, October 8, 1845. Withington disparaged the use of
“thrilling facts” in 1840 - that they could only “operate among women and men like women, who
confound pathos with argument and means with ends.” Withington, A Review of the Late
Temperance Movement, 22-23
155
Newburyport (MA) Daily Herald, October 8, 1845.
71
Rev. Thomas Whittemore, editor of the Trumpet and Universalist Magazine, along with a
few other Universalists, joined the fray with a series of articles decrying the evangelical orthodox
Church’s overbearing influence in moral reform and their abduction of a non-sectarian
movement for denominational indoctrination. Whittemore had repeatedly taken the orthodox
churches to task for their quest for popular and emotional religion at the expense of theological
consistency and rational understanding. 156 He now took aim at their control over popular reform
and he pointed up the rapport that existed between Gough and the orthodox evangelicals. They
had “courted and flattered” him and “had done all in their power to identify his popularity with
their sect and make it as subservient as possible to the promotion thereof.” Gough’s joining the
Mount Vernon Congregational Church, on the other hand, became for him “a passport to the
favor of all the orthodox clergy, editors, correspondents, and in fact of all the people of that faith
in our country.” orthodox ministers had given him “direction and counsel” and favored his
meetings with their endorsement and opening prayers, and Gough always remembered to adorn
his discourse with “orthodox sentiments” by preaching “endless misery” and “endless death” for
the drunkard – a doctrine the Universalists found objectionable for encouraging irrational fear
and morbid sentimentality. Whittemore chafed at the orthodox churches’ cover-up of Gough’s
scandal, especially the circular issued by his church, which glossed over the suspicious
circumstances in the scandal and endorsed the drugging story. “Orthodoxy… is like charity,”
Whittemore remarked scornfully: “it covers a multitude of sins.” 157
156
Ann Lee Bressler, The Universalist Movement in America, 1770-1880 (Oxford and New York,
2001), 58-60.
157
Trumpet and Universalist Magazine (Boston, MA), Nov. 20, 1845; Dec. 20, 1845; Feb. 28,
1846.
72
By and large, the orthodox evangelicals justified the “new measures” in popular reform
on religious grounds and embraced reformed drunkards as legitimate exhorters for the
temperance cause. To the attacks of the rationalists, they responded with a vehement (if not
always reasonable) defense. For the editor of the temperance journal Gardiner (NH) Fountain,
Gough’s word was “above suspicion” because of his avowed dependence on God 158 and the
“Christian pathos” of his lectures, and it was for this reason, the editor argued, that the
Universalists (in Gospel Banner, for example) chose to oppose the lecturer. 159 Rev. Daniel P.
Pike, the evangelical preacher of the Christian Church (Congregational) in Newburyport, MA,
sought (in vain) to extinguish Rev. Leonard Withington’s argument with emotional pleas and
denials, dismissing the latter’s conclusions as absurd and his motive as anti-temperance. 160
Rev. Stephen Farley 161 of Amesbury, MA fared better as a polemicist. He faulted Rev.
Leonard Withington for his self-righteousness and elitism. 162 The high-minded clergy who
refused to accept reformed drunkards as equals and lay exhorters because of their past
debaucheries, according to Farley, were guilty of the sin of pride. Virtue, for him, lay not so
much in the passive state of the absence of vice (a clean slate), but in the active denial of one’s
158
The editor reported that Gough had told him in person that “he never rose to speak without
deeply feeling his dependence on God.” See Gardiner (NH) Fountain, in News Clippings Folio
Vol. 2, p. 14, Gough Papers.
159
“Gough was too good a man, and too religious for him, hence his gross opposition to him.”
See Gardiner (NH) Fountain, in News Clippings Folio Vol. 2, p. 14, Gough Papers.
160
Newburyport (MA) Daily Herald, Oct. 11, 1845.
161
Rev. Farley had been ordained a Congregational minister in Claremont, NH in 1806, but quit
his church in 1819. Rev. Russell Streeter, father of the pro-Gough editor of the Boston Daily Star
Leander R. Streeter and a Universalist clergyman, criticized Farley’s pamphlet A Solemn Protest
against Universal Salvation (Concord, NH, 1816) as a “hopeless attempt to straddle Calvinism
and a kind of works righteousness.” Bressler, The Universalist Movement in America, 58
162
And he criticized Rev. Pike for his “snapping, snarling and bitter spirit.”
73
sinful inclination. And it was just as difficult for clergymen “sequestered” from the “common
pursuits of business” to overcome intellectual “pride, spleen and a desire for distinction” as it
was for laymen to “conquer their love of riches, pleasure or honor.” Rev. Farley insisted on “the
doctrine of repentance and forgiveness of sins” as “the fundamental principle of the Gospel of
Christ” and also as the “foundation” of moral reform. Forgiveness and restoration should be
granted to reformed drunkards as well as to all penitent sinners. “Among Christians,” Rev.
Farley concluded: “there should be no unpardonable sins.” 163
Lucian Minor of Louisa County, VA, a Whig and a prohibitionist, 164 took this liberal
view of sin and moral reformation even further. “Many of the most effective preachers of the
country,” he argued: “were once sad, dissipated dogs,” and “they owed to their previous
enormities most of their effectiveness as preachers.” He romanticized the character of the
drunkard and portrayed him as “the victim of his own kindly impulses, and unsuspecting nature.”
The drunkard was often “of a more generous heart, of nicer sensibilities…and of a superior
intellect.” The reformed drunkard was “a far more effective champion against intemperance, than
a man of but equal talents, who has no bitter memories of his own shame to animate his appeals.”
“Reasoning,” “statistics” and “eloquence” all appeared “tame and vapid when compared with the
soul that breathes and burns through the reformed man’s natural touches and living delineations.”
Gough’s scandal in no way diminished his effectiveness but “add[ed] one more – a most signal
163
Newburyport (MA) Daily Herald, Dec. 20, 1845.
164
Most likely Lucian Minor, the commonwealth attorney for Louisa County, VA and author of
a prohibitionist tract titled Reasons for Abolishing the Liquor Traffic: Addressed to the People of
Virginia (Richmond, VA, 1853), which had a sale of 30,000.
74
one – to his previous list of bitter and instructive experiences; fitting him better than ever to warn
against the touch or taste of aught alcoholic, or of aught in which alcohol may be hidden.” 165
The defense of moral sensationalism and the new “philosophy of reformation” 166 embodied
in the human agency of repentance and forgiveness formed a direct contrast with the rationalists
who were suspicious of dramatic reformation and lay exhortation and (justifiably) skeptical
toward sensational discourse. At issue was not just the drunkard’s character but the ideology and
vision of reform advocacy and evangelical pulpit. Farley represented the egalitarian and
perfectionist impulse in evangelical reform:
[T]he only proper question in regard to a lecturer or a preacher is, not what he once was,
but what he now is. If he now be a true temperance man, a pious man, and possess the
requisite knowledge and gifts to deliver instructive and interesting lectures or sermons, it is
fitting and proper that he should be encouraged. 167
In essence, Farley undermined the profession and authority of the learned clergy. His new
lecturer/preacher found his qualifications not in scholarly erudition or a spotless record but in
sincerity and piety and the (natural) ability to interest and instruct his audience. Evangelical
reformers embraced sensational story-telling/acting (which Gough specialized in) and hoped to
use it as the vehicle of popular reform. 168
The rationalists could not easily escape the accusation of elitism. By excoriating lay
exhortation and drawing distinctions between moral and legal action, they betrayed their
suspicion of social mobility created by popular reform. But they were certainly right in
165
Richmond (VA) Whig, “Mr. Gough – Objection to Reformed Drunkards as Temperance
Lecturers,” in News Clippings Folio Vol. 2, pp. 53-4, Gough Papers.
166
Stephen Farley in Newburyport (MA) Daily Herald, Dec. 20, 1845.
167
Ibid.
168
We will examine the connections between Gough’s lecturing and popular preaching more
closely in Ch. III.
75
criticizing sensationalism in reform, as the qualifications for reform advocacy drifted away from
the first principle of sincerity and piety to become solely dependent on the ability to attract and
interest crowds. As the temperance movement was being popularized, it was becoming more and
more indistinguishable from the commercially-oriented show business.
The Cultural Politics of Temperance and Self-Making
Gough’s scandal was not a comic sideshow but a main act (albeit one without a hero) in the
schism of the temperance movement at mid-century. It brought to light the class and sectarian
issues besetting what appears to be a broad-based movement and stripped Gough’s popular
support to its core – the mercantile bourgeois men and women and the socially conservative
evangelical reformers. That some (like Horace Greely) moved cautiously from the middle-of-theroad Whiggism in the 1840s to embrace the more radical anti-slavery politics in the Republican
Party does not mean that others or most (like Rev. John Chambers) had taken the same step.
The significance of the scandal lay not so much in Gough’s fall and his lying about it,
both of which he was capable of, but in the fact that moral (and probably otherwise sincere) men
and women defended the lie and were willing to stake their reputation upon it. We do not know
the individual considerations behind each person’s choice to support Gough, but we do know
that the moral reformers and the moral press took the scandal seriously, and many struggled,
wavered, but were finally forced (partly due to the moral disarray caused by the “humbugs,” and
partly due to their allegiance to the prohibitionist agenda) to endorse the drugging story (some of
Gough’s prohibitionist allies during the scandal would live to regret their decision in the late
1850s). The scandal presented a moral dilemma (and a great show) where it became necessary to
commit fraud (or to commit oneself to a lie) in order to uphold the sincerity and truth of reform
and the semblance of moral order.
76
We also know that many more did not buy Gough’s fantastical story, and the effort to
reinstate Gough as a temperance lecturer despite his fall alienated a good number of people who
were otherwise supportive of the temperance reform. The disbelievers and skeptics included both
friends and enemies of reform, and they came from different walks of life: the commercial press,
the workingmen temperance societies, and the theologically conservative (anti-evangelical)
ministry.
The scandal was a focal point of the class, cultural, and sectarian conflicts in midVictorian American society, and incidentally, the public debate over it defies our notion that the
central tension in the class politics of reform was a dichotomy of social control versus selfcontrol. It was in the commercial press that the anti-temperance and anti-reform men gathered
their forces and marshaled their arguments. Some (like Wilkes and Snelling) challenged Gough’s
veracity and marketed the “true” stories of the scandal as commodity; others (like Bennett and
Walsh) tried to overthrow the temperance movement altogether by invoking anti-authoritarian
and populist speech against moral reformers and by characterizing teetotalism as a delusion or
disease. The scandal brought about a confrontation within the temperance movement between
the lower middle class (of small shopkeepers and independent artisans) and the new mercantile
bourgeoisie. They did not so much differ over the goal of reform or even the means (social
control through legislation or self-control by moral suasion) to achieve it, but they disagreed over
how to run temperance societies (on a voluntary or a commercial principle). 169 The scandal
reenacted a religious controversy over the “new measures” of evangelicalism. The rationalist
editors and theologians lamented the triumph of moral sensationalism and the elevation of lay
exhorters for sensational effect. They worried, surprisingly more than the teetotal artisans, about
169
The politics of moral suasion versus legal suasion will be discussed in the next chapter.
77
the separation of moral reform from politicking (of moral suasion and legal suasion) and about
the growing influence of the evangelical orthodox churches in politics.
The public campaign to reinstate Gough after the scandal showed the business acumen
and the resolve and unity of his bourgeois supporters. 170 It was an affirmation of the business
management, the political turn toward legislative prohibition, and the “new measures” of the
temperance movement, and it vindicated the bourgeois model of self-making (reconciling
uneasily business, wealth, piety, and morality) as embodied in Gough. But the success of the
campaign was also limited (to a particular class of society). Gough’s audience became
increasingly respectable and uniformly bourgeois (with bourgeois women replacing the
workingmen as the new impetus of the temperance movement). The lecturer found no one to
contend with on the principle of teetotalism among his paying audience, but was reaffirming a
broadly-accepted standard of enlightened and respectable behavior through his enactment of
“real-life” stories, and he told his audience to find the roots of poverty and crime in irreligion (or
non-orthodox religion), in drinking, and in the licensed “rum business” and the nefarious
influence of the rum-sellers, who, incidentally, had conspired to drug him and to bring him down
with their cause.
170
The alliance for legislative action, which returned Gough to the platform in 1845, would
come apart in the mid-to-late 1850s. See Ch. II.
78
CHAPTER TWO
“St. Bartholomew” on Trial: Gough v. Lees (1858)
and the Transatlantic Temperance Schism
Let our sacred cause be as free as possible from cant and sham of every kind – and from
what, in your country, is called Barnumizing. St. Beauve says of the Parisians, they are
saved by the Theatre and the Stage. Now I don’t believe in dramatic-salvation; - on the
contrary, I believe that it is a species of social-Opium, giving rise to alternations of
excitement and stupidity.
Frederic Richard Lees, The History of A Blunder (1857) 171
By the mid-1850s, John B. Gough had, by all appearances, put the scandal behind him. He
seldom had to refer to the incident and had quietly (in 1853) taken his statement about the
scandal out of his bestselling autobiography. 172 He had become a household name in the Englishspeaking Atlantic world. Not only was he welcomed in the Canadian provinces, his first visit to
London as an “American” temperance lecturer in 1853 touched off a general temperance revival
in the British Isles (see fig. 1). 173 So popular was he in Britain (his six-week tour in 1853 had
been extended into two years) that by the time he returned to America in 1855, he was already
engaged by the London Temperance League for another round of tour to begin in 1857 for three
years on the terms of £ 2,000 per annum or ten guineas per lecture.
171
Frederic Richard Lees, The History of a Blunder: A Letter to John Bartholomew Gough (n.p.,
1857), 9.
172
More about this in Ch. IV.
173
Brian Harrison credited him with rejuvenating the National Temperance League. Harrison,
Drink and the Victorians (London, 1971), 145, 232, 370.
79
Fig. 1. Procession of the London Temperance League in Honor of Gough, London, 1853
Source: Illustrated London News, Sept. 17, 1853
The “Dead Letter”
On March 23, 1857, writing to an agent of the National (previously London) Temperance League
in anticipation of his second British tour, Gough bemoaned the “depressed state” of the
temperance cause in America and called the prohibitory Maine Law “a dead letter
everywhere.” 174 “[M]ore liquor sold than I ever knew before in Massachusetts,” he complained,
“and in other States it is about as bad.” Never selling himself short, the lecturer expressed regret
for having to leave shortly for the British Isles. “I never had so many and so earnest applications
for labour (in America),” he wrote, “and the field is truly ready – not for the sickle, but for steady
174
The Maine liquor law was passed under the aegis of Neal Dow in Maine in 1851.
80
persevering tillage, but we shall leave our dear home in July with the expectation of labouring
with you…for the next three years.” 175
Upon the letter’s arrival in London, it was immediately published in the Weekly Record,
the organ of the National Temperance League – just a few days before the anticipated landing of
Neal Dow, the father of the Maine Law, in Liverpool. The letter caused a general uproar in the
temperance community and particularly upset the British prohibitionists of the United Kingdom
Alliance, who had sponsored Dow’s visit. Although such grim reports about the American Maine
Law were not unheard of in the British press, the source of the report took many, including the
visiting Neal Dow, by surprise. 176 Gough’s bleak report was a godsend for the antiprohibitionists. The letter was picked up by the London Times and from there was copied by the
provincial papers. It was said that the “dead letter,” as it soon came to be known, was being
placarded in beer shops and gin palaces. 177
To be sure, Gough did not write expressly for the benefit of the publicans. In self-defense,
Gough argued that in another letter, which he claimed to have sent concurrently to J. S. Marr,
secretary of the Scottish Temperance League (the Glasgow counterpart of the London-based
National Temperance League), he had laid out the reasons for his conclusion. He explained that
the Maine Law was “premature” and its enforcement lacked public support. The Maine Law had
received legislative approval as the result of political maneuvering and trickery. The
175
Weekly Record (London), Apr. 11, 1857. Reprinted in London Times, Apr. 18, 1857. Only
excerpts of the original letter were published. In the second half of the excerpts, Gough sang the
praises of the Weekly Record (that “it is capital” and that “we need just such a journal here”) and
alluded to Dow’s prospective visit to England (that Dow could “tell better than any other man the
state of the Maine-Law movement here, and the cause of the present universal failure of the law
to produce the desired results”).
176
Alliance Weekly News (Manchester, England), Apr. 23, 1857.
177
Christian News (Edinburgh), May 9, 1857.
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prohibitionists neglected to “ensure its success by infusing a thorough temperance sentiment into
the minds of all classes,” and such a sentiment, based on “personal abstinence,” must precede the
implementation of any prohibitive measure. He suggested further that the political agitation over
slavery extension had eclipsed the popular appeal of the Maine Law. 178 The “dead letter” was
meant to be taken as a cautionary tale for the United Kingdom Alliance (U.K.A.) and its goahead prohibitionist leaders, and it closely adhered to the “moral suasion” agenda of the Leagues,
which had but recently abjured political agitation. The bone of contention here was not the
necessity of moral suasion, which both camps agreed upon, but the desirability of immediate
prohibition.
The Alliance men felt, justifiably, that the timing of the letter’s publication was intended
to create obstacles for Dow’s visit and to sabotage their effort to introduce a Maine-Law-style
prohibitory bill in Parliament. They suspected, not without reason, that the “dead letter” was
being “fished-for” and that the masterminds behind the whole scheme were a few officers of the
Leagues, who had drawn up lucrative contracts with Gough and who were becoming openly
hostile toward the Alliance and prohibition. 179
Gough was charged with inconsistency and mercenary motives. Indeed, the Alliance
people did not have to look very far to find evidence of Gough’s pro-law sentiments. 180 He
managed to survive his 1845 scandal owing to the support of the legal suasionists. He came out
178
Weekly Record (London), Apr. 25, 1857.
179
Lees, The History of a Blunder (n.p., 1857), 24.
180
Christian News (Edinburgh), July 11, 1857.The editor, John Kirk, listed Gough’s prior
speeches in favor of the Maine Law.
82
as a strong defender of the Maine Law in 1853-55 during his first British tour. 181 In Boston in
May 1856, he pointed up the futility of moral suasion in effecting a general temperance
reformation: it was as if to “try to storm Gibraltar with a pop-gun; to shoot a gun off moderately;
or to make Brooks [the man who caned Charles Sumner on the House floor] of South Carolina a
decent man.” 182 In his farewell speech at the Mechanics’ Hall in Worcester, MA right before his
departure, Gough was reported to have announced that he was going to Britain a second time to
preach the same principle of total annihilation of the liquor traffic as he had been doing in
America. 183 The “dead letter” was not a reflection long pondered upon, but was a deliberate
Gough maneuver to ingratiate himself with his patrons.
The “dead letter” was surely not the first sign of trouble in the relationship between the
United Kingdom Alliance and the Leagues. Thomas Knox, the president of the Edinburgh Total
Abstinence Society and vice-president of the Scottish Temperance League, had already declared
war on the political policy and advocacy of the United Kingdom Alliance in an Edinburgh paper,
the Glasgow Commonwealth in late 1856. He was held responsible for having triggered a riot in
181
In a volume of lectures delivered by Gough during his first British tour and published in
London in 1854 (by William Tweedie, the same person who later published the “dead letter”),
the lecturer was recorded to have personally defended the Maine Law and the British campaign
against the liquor traffic. He made emotional appeals to his London audience to “wage war
against the traffic…to annihilation” against the assertion that the times was “not ripe for the
law.” He was forthcoming about the limits of moral suasion, which he thought powerless against
“a man who has no moral principle,” and he urged that “the devil must sometimes be rooted out
by main force…[before] you can turn round and use moral suasion.” John B. Gough, Oration,
Delivered on Various Occasions (London, 1854), 217, 221, 222-223.
182
The Congregationalist (Boston, MA), May 30, 1856. The speech was reprinted in the Weekly
Record, a few months before the “dead letter” made its debut. See Christian News (Edinburgh),
July 11, 1857. “Some said it was political capital he [Gough] wished, but he threw the assertion
back in their faces; he should as soon think of making political capital out of what religion he
had… It was time to express ourselves – and every citizen could express himself at the ballotbox.”
183
Worcester (MA) Daily Transcript, July 10, 1857.
83
Edinburgh by university students against prohibitionists in January 1857. Gough’s letter was
rather the last straw in a long and multifaceted controversy dating back to at least 1855, and it
finally broke the back of the already strained temperance alliance between go-ahead political
prohibitionists and the more timid and half-hearted “moral suasion” evangelicals. 184 By casting
his lot with the evangelical moral suasionists (ironic since he had turned his back on the
Washingtonian moral suasionists by 1845), Gough stoked the fire of factionalism and enmity in
the temperance movement again at mid-century. The prospect of his second tour was clouded,
even before he stepped on British soil.
Every political struggle has a personal side to it. The “dead letter” controversy pitted
leading prohibitionists against Gough and his friends in the Leagues, who smeared each other’s
character as well as their policy. The skirmishes quickly turned vicious and centered on the
rivalry of Gough and Dr. Frederic Richard Lees (1815-1896), an advocate of prohibition and a
seasoned lecturer for the Alliance, who had strong Chartist and abolitionist sympathies (his
father was a wool-comber turned schoolmaster in Leeds and a Radical in favor of Parliamentary
reform and universal manhood suffrage). 185 Trained in the law, Lees emphasized reason and
spoke to the head, rather than to the heart. His speech and writing style was often dry and
methodical. He dealt in statistics, theories (philosophical or biblical), and logic – almost Gough’s
opposite. He did not have strong church affiliations, but was religious nonetheless. He had a
184
See Peter Turner Winskill, The Temperance Movement and Its Workers (4 vols., London,
Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Dublin, 1891-2), 3:90-92; also London Times, Mar. 2, 1857. Thomas
Knox had published a series of letters critical of the U.K.A. policy in the Glasgow
Commonwealth (ed. Robert Rae, secretary of the Scottish Temperance League) in 1856 under the
pen name “Auld Reekie.”
185
The honorary degree of Doctor of Philosophy was allegedly conferred upon him on Aug. 15,
1842 by the University of Giessen (Germany) for his refutation of Owenite socialism and his
contribution on the study of Bible Wines. See Frederic Arnold Lees, Dr. Frederic Richard Lees,
F.S.A. Edin.: A Biography (London, 1904), 45-46. But this has not been independently verified.
84
broad range of interests that included transcendentalism, Fourierism, and animal magnetism. He
promoted workingmen cooperatives in order to compete with capital in the free market, but
attacked Owenism and later socialism for its anti-intuitional and anti-religious tendencies. 186 In
early 1858, Gough and his friends would initiate legal proceedings at the Court of Exchequer in
London against Lees, the spokesman for the prohibition cause, for spreading “rumors” of
Gough’s alleged opium-eating habit. Although the widely reported temperance libel trial was
decided for Gough in the end, it by no means settled the score with Lees and the prohibitionists,
but only deepened the rift of the temperance movement on both sides of the Atlantic.
Looking back on the temperance controversy, Lees regretted the “[b]itterness, violence,
and the exposure of internal dissensions in law-courts.” But “as far as it was a question of honest
conviction, and not of institutional jealousy, personal ambition, or self-seeking,” he concluded,
“the division was clearly inevitable.” 187 To understand the nature of the “inevitable” split as
made public by Gough v. Lees, it will be necessary for us to delve deeper into the public
discourse surrounding temperance and prohibition at mid-century and to discover the cultural
forces that informed the “convictions” of the diverging wings of temperance reform. There was a
long and somewhat convoluted prequel where Lees had played a far more important part than
186
Frederic Arnold Lees, Dr. Frederic Richard Lees, F.S.A. Edin.: A Biography (London, 1904);
J. A. Pitney, “Frederic Richard Lees: The Teetotal Philosopher” (Master’s thesis, University of
Wisconsin, Madison, 1970); Frederic Richard Lees, Owenism Dissected (Leeds, England, 1838).
From 1845 to 1849, Lees was the editor of the magazine Truth-Seeker (London) that promised “a
catholic review of literature, philosophy, and religion.”
187
Frederic Richard Lees, “A Chapter of Temperance History,” 3, in Lees, Life and How to
Renew It (London, 1871).
85
Gough 188 , which laid the ground for the final and almost anti-climatic act of the confrontation of
two of the movement’s most iconic spokesmen in 1858.
The Prequel: Science, Gospel, and Moral Philosophy
The split of the temperance movement into moral suasion and prohibitionist camps at midcentury has always been understood as a difference in appearance rather than of substance. To
historian Brian Harrison, it was a disagreement in the “degree and timing of control.”189 But a
closer look at the disputes that culminated in Gough v. Lees reveals that strong political pressures
and ideological differences informed the temperance schism. Moreover, while Gough’s
turnabout is understandable, the reasons for the evangelical retreat from prohibition at midcentury have been less explored. After all, they had been a mainstay in the prohibitionist
movement up to at least the mid-1850s.
The debate over moral suasion versus prohibition at mid-century was by no means a
tempest in a teapot. It was of British origin, to be sure, but had transatlantic reverberations. The
personal conflicts between Gough and Lees certainly drew great publicity to the debate in 1857-8,
but the enactment of the Maine Law in the northern states in the U.S. in the early ‘50s and the
concurrent campaigns for such a law in Britain and its Canadian provinces had long been a cause
for concern for the British wine-drinking elite. By the mid-1850s, they had begun to marshal
arguments against the scientific, biblical, and philosophical foundations of the prohibitionist
movement, selecting as their organ respectable literary and political review magazines, such as
the Westminster Review (London), Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, and the Saturday Review
188
Gough was nonetheless aware of the temperance debate and the key points on each side. He
did not, however, make any original contributions to it, as Lees did.
189
Harrison, Drink and the Victorians, 214
86
(London). 190 Though the teetotal argument against the use of alcoholic wine in Communion had
been repeatedly assailed by the religious orthodoxy, physiology and political economy (or moral
economy) had long been utilized by the teetotaler theorists to promote the prohibitionist
agenda. 191
Therefore, counter-arguments in these realms, coupled with exhortations on the virtues of
voluntarism and moral suasion, were applauded by the wine-drinkers, especially when they were
delivered by the ablest pens of the London literary circle such as the critic George Henry Lewes
and the philosopher John Stuart Mill. 192 The British and American prohibitionists responded in
kind by publishing their responses in tracts or temperance journals. This debate that took place in
selective circles warrants our serious attention not only for its own sake as intellectual history,
but also for its fallout and broader social impact. In fact, there is strong indication that the attacks
by the literary elite and the rallying of respectable opinion against teetotalism and prohibition
had exerted enough pressure on the half-hearted evangelical supporters of prohibition that they
190
In contrast, the American literary and intellectual elite generally eschewed serious discussions
of the drink issue (for lack of a public forum?) or only insinuated it in fiction or verse.
191
See Lees, An Argument for the Legislative Prohibition of the Liquor Traffic (London, 1857),
18, and Essays Historical and Critical on the Temperance Question (London, 1853), 97, 208.
Lees had used Benthamite political economy (“The sole object of Government ought to be the
greatest happiness of the greatest possible number of the community”) and John Stuart Mill’s
System of Logic to defend teetotalism and prohibition.
192
There have been few in-depth studies of the readership of the British literary and political
review magazines. The standard source is Alvar Ellegård, “The Readership of the Periodical
Press in Mid-Victorian Britain: II. Directory,” Victorian Periodicals Newsletter, 13 (1971).
Some have described journals such as the Westminster or the Blackwood’s as “middle-class”
reads. But as we know, the “middle class” in Britain (as in America) has become less uniform
and more stratified in recent historical studies, ranging from bankers and large estate owners of
non-aristocratic origin to shopkeepers and printers on the Strand. We can be sure, however, that
these journals had a very selective readership (upper-middle) and that it would have been
unlikely to find working-class beer-drinkers poring over the Westminster Review. See Fionnuala
Dillane, “ ‘The Character of Editress’: Marian Evans at the Westminster Review, 1851-54,”
Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 30:2 (Fall 2011), 269-290.
87
not only ensconced themselves on the safer ground of moral suasion, which the literary elite also
approved, but they turned around and attacked prohibitionism. In this intellectual-turnedfactional conflict, Gough v. Lees was but the tip of the iceberg.
Physiology
By the time George Henry Lewes reviewed Jacob Moleschott, a Dutch physiologist trained at
Heidelberg, in the Westminster, the infusion of German chemistry marked by the translation of
Justus von Liebig’s Animal Chemistry in 1842 had already transformed the study of physiology
in Britain. 193 Lewes, a known literary critic and bohemian, who had just returned from a
continental sojourn (with his mistress, Marian Evans, alias George Eliot 194 ), was a new convert
to the German school of chemical physiology. He had only recently become enamored with
science while researching a biography of Goethe. 195
Lewes’ review, titled “The Physiological Errors of Teetotalism,” caught public attention
instantly, as it bluntly critiqued the physiological magnum opus of the teetotal physician,
William Benjamin Carpenter, and boldly defended the much-assailed character of alcohol and of
its moderate usage, using the latest theories of chemical-physiology. Frederic Richard Lees, who
was called upon to make a rebuttal against Lewes in 1855, conceded the article’s shock value (if
193
“The Physiological Errors of Teetotalism,” Westminster Review 64, no. 125 (July, 1855), 94124. The article was published anonymously, but was later attributed to Lewes. Justus von
Liebig, Animal Chemistry, Or Organic Chemistry in Its Applications to Physiology and
Pathology, trans. William Gregory (London, 1842).
194
Marian Evans had secretly edited the Westminster Review for three years between 1851 and
1854 for the nominal editor John Chapman. She might have been responsible for the publication
of Lewes’s anti-teetotal article. Her own anti-evangelist review appeared in the next issue of
Westminster (Oct. 1855).
195
For a biography of Lewes, see Rosemary Ashton, G. H. Lewes, A Life (Oxford, 1991).
88
not its theoretical validity) as part of the “scientific stampede” that shook the confidence of many
teetotalers. 196
Lewes belittled teetotal physiology for its crude “argument from excess.” He blamed Dr.
Carpenter and the teetotal advocates for using cases of excessive drinking to prejudice people
against moderate usage. While the “alcohol-is-poison” argument of some radical teetotalers
might be effective scare tactics for the drunkards and the impressionable “poorer classes,” Lewes
maintained that it was “worthless” as science and “impertinent” to the readers of the Westminster
Review, most of whom he believed were sensible and moderate (wine) drinkers. 197 But despite
Lewes’s pretense of intellectual high ground, the disparity of his and the teetotaler’s physiology
were not so much a stark contrast between science and pseudoscience (or between a newer and
older theory, for that matter); rather, it represented diverging trends and emphases in midVictorian understandings of physiology, which were both informed by the German chemist
Justus von Liebig’s theorization of the roles of food and tissues in the human organism.
By 1855, Liebig’s landmark work, translated as Animal Chemistry, which for the first
time gave chemistry a significant role in the study of human physiology, had been out for more
than a decade. 198 It was no news to the teetotaler theorists that Liebig divided food into two
distinct types by its purpose, that of the tissue-making or “plastic” sort and that of the heatmaking or “respiratory” kind. Nor were they oblivious to Liebig’s theorization of the chemical
196
Frederic Richard Lees, “The New Discoveries on the Action of Alcohol,” Meliora 4, no.13
(1862): 42.
197
G. W. Lewes, “The Physiological Errors of Teetotalism,” Westminster Review (new series) 8,
no. 1 (July, 1855): 96-97, 100.
198
Herbert S. Klickstein counts 2 editions published in England, 3 in America, 3 in Germany up
to 1847. See Herbert S. Klickstein, “Charles Caldwell and the Controversy in America over
Liebig’s ‘Animal Chemistry’,” Chymia 4 (1953), 129, n. 2.
89
action in the respiratory process. The teetotal philosophers imbibed Liebig’s theories. Lees, for
example, followed Animal Chemistry almost to the letter, when he posited life and health as a
state of “balance or harmony of the conflicting powers” of the vital and the chemical principles.
(The “vital” power was thought to be an immaterial and intrinsic force of the living human
tissues, inspired by an act or design of God, as opposed to the material and external force of the
chemical reaction.) However, Lees regarded the vital principle as the superior and as the “higher
life,” which Liebig did not specify in his original treatise. The vital force inherent in the living
tissues was not only the sole source of animation for Lees, but it “regulates, modifies, and
controls mere chemical agencies.” 199 Chemistry had its proper place for the teetotalers akin to a
“furnace” (or a garbage incinerator). The human tissues, after (and only after) expending their
vital power, became “effete” and lost their resistance to oxygen and its chemical agency. The
effete tissues were then “burned” in the “furnace” of arterial blood (with oxygen), making it
“venous” to discharge carbon dioxide and to be recharged with oxygen in the respiratory process.
This flameless “combustion” created heat (a by-product, more or less, for the teetotalers)
necessary for the normal function of vital organs. Essentially, the chemical principle was, for the
teetotalers, a process of waste disposal and recycle (incidentally, showcasing God’s perfect
design), but it did not by itself create nervo-muscular force. 200
Lewes had a completely different assessment of the relative importance of the two
principles. He built on Liebig’s theories, but adhered more closely to the Dutch physiologist
Jacob Moleschott’s more advanced and controversial materialism, whose works would not be
199
Frederic Richard Lees, Scientific Teetotalism: Appendices to the Illustrated History of
Alcohol (London, 1843), viii.
200
See W. B. Carpenter, The Physiology of Temperance and Total Abstinence (London, 1853),
16-17.
90
translated into English until 1856. 201 Lewes argued that the chemical action was capable of
producing both heat and force, and that respiratory food (which could combine chemically with
oxygen without being vitalized as tissues) was in fact predominant in the human diet (“five times
the weight” of the plastic or tissue-forming kind). Instead of a garbage incinerator, Lewes
envisioned the chemical principle as somewhat similar to the workings of a steam engine in the
human body. For it to be operational, the human steam engine must need a constant supply of
fuel, which could be furnished either by respiratory food or by the sacrifice of nervo-muscular
tissues. In other words, the human engine would consume its own body as an alternative fuel in
the absence of more combustible fuel foods. 202 In contrast to the teetotalers, Lewes made scant
references to the vital force of human tissues (except that the proper functioning of the vital
processes must need the animal heat produced by chemical combustion), and he was drawing
attention entirely to the chemical-physiological action as the dominant principle of animated
beings.
The different emphases on the vital versus the chemical action of life informed the debate
over the role of alcohol in the human circulating system. For the teetotalers, alcohol was
poisonous. It was found, through physiological experiments, to remain intact in the system, in
whatever amount taken, without contributing to the vital principle of forming tissues. 203 The
arrival of chemical-physiology may have altered the teetotal theory on the action of alcohol, but
201
For Jacob Moleschott, see Frederick Gregory, Scientific Materialism in Nineteenth Century
Germany (Dordrecht, Holland; Boston, MA, 1977), Ch. IV.
202
Lewes, “The Physiological Errors of Teetotalism,” 102-3. Compare Lees’s assertion of the
plastic to respiratory food ratio of 4 to 3. Lees, Scientific Teetotalism, x.
203
See, for example, Dr. William Beaumont’s experiment on an injured soldier St. Martin, in
Beaumont, Experiments and Observations on the Gastric Juice, and the Physiology of Digestion
(Edinburgh, 1838). Cited in Lees, Scientific Teetotalism.
91
did not change the final verdict. If alcohol was easily combustible with oxygen in the blood, the
teetotalers argued, it would “retard” the waste disposal or the “change of matter” process by
“robbing the blood of oxygen” and thus keeping dead tissues (which was meant to be burned)
from being decomposed and removed. The accumulation of effete matter, in turn, put a stop to
“the nourishment of the body,” preventing the formation of new living tissues and arresting
digestion and all other normal vital functions of life.204
Lewes reached an opposite conclusion based on the combustibility of alcohol. Because of
its “digestibility” (swiftly entering the blood) and “greater affinity for oxygen,” alcohol made for
a superior fuel or respiratory food. Following Moleschott (Lehre der Nahrungsmittel), Lewes
argued that alcohol was a “savings-bank” (“Sparbüchse” or piggy bank) of the tissues. By
“offering itself as fuel” in the first place, it obviated the need for consuming living tissues and
thus saved them for the future. “If Alcohol prevents a certain quantity of effete tissue from being
burned and carried away,” Lewes retorted, “it also prevents a certain quantity of living tissue
from becoming effete.” 205
Teetotalers, however, refused to believe that the combustion of alcohol had no bearings
on the tissues. Dr. Carpenter, for one, insisted that alcohol was a stimulant and that like all other
stimulants, it temporarily excited the nervous system, which he believed led to “a more rapid
metamorphosis of its substance.” In other words, alcohol did not save the nerve tissues, but
increased their rate of consumption. All this generated “no real increase to the strength,” but
204
Lees, Scientific Teetotalism, xi., and Lees, “Controversy with G. H. Lewes [1855],” in The
Selected Works of Dr. F. R. Lees (10 vols., London, 1886), 6:209.
205
Lewes, “The Physiological Errors of Teetotalism,” 109, 111.
92
(according to Lees) “dulled” muscular actions of the body and brought on premature prostration
and debility. 206
Taking the teetotal argument head-on, Lewes argued that alcohol was a “positive
nutriment” and that it “evolves force in its combustion.” Even if the combustion might result in
the greater consumption of tissue, alcohol in itself contributed substantially to the real increase of
strength. And “this evolution of [chemical] force, which is at the expense of Alcohol,” according
to Lewes, “is a substitute for the [vital] force which would otherwise be evolved at the expense
of tissue.” 207 Lewes did not spell out the full implications of his theory (perhaps on purpose), but
he was essentially arguing that the chemical action (the artificial force generated by alcohol) was
capable of replacing (and obviating) the vital function – he was but a short step away from
Moleschott’s full-fledged materialism (fully explored in the latter’s controversial treatise Der
Kreislauf des Lebens, which Lewes had also read and cited).
Therefore, the physiological debate over alcohol was about partisanship as well as
metaphysics. Lewes and his chemistry-focused argument presented a challenge to the teetotal
physiology, but more importantly, to vitalism and the conception of a natural or Providential
order of things that many (not just teetotalers) still held dear. 208 At the same time, each side
enlisted organic chemistry for their own purposes, and neither seemed (yet) to have gained the
206
Ibid., 112
207
Ibid., 107, 111, 112. Lewes even suggested the possible tissue-forming/nutritive value of
alcohol, which he predicted was likely to be borne out by new discoveries in organic chemistry.
208
For vitalism and Liebig, see Otto Sonntag, “Religion and Science in the Thought of Liebig,”
The Journal of the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry 24:3 (Nov. 1977), 159-169.
93
upper hand on scientific grounds. 209 But Lewes managed to bring the prestige of the Westminster
Review and the ingrained prejudice of the British elite to bear upon the teetotal physicians and
ministers, who formed part of the middle-class leadership of the temperance movement. And
much to Lees’s regret, they buckled under the pressure by 1857. 210
Bible Wines
On the biblical question, the prohibitionists were up against entrenched church traditions and the
orthodox reading of the Bible in favor of liturgical wine-drinking and legitimate social use. 211
Lees argued that temperance was primarily “a physical and social question” and alcohol was
“dietetically bad.” The duty of teetotalism evolved from “experimental and social facts” and was
based on “the firm ground of common conscience and reason”; it did not need to proceed from a
biblical text. The natural law, which was also a divine law, was sufficient to justify teetotalism,
and the Book of Nature contained truth of equal validity and authority as the Book of Revelation.
It was “a degrading superstition,” Lees maintained, to distrust common sense and reason
(“natural and reasonable evidence”) and to seek answers in the Bible at every turn. 212
209
Indeed, Westminster Review would publish an article in 1862, renouncing Lewes’s views.
Anon., “Alcohol: What Becomes of It in the Living Body,” Westminster Review (new series) 19,
no. 1 (Jan., 1861), 33-56.
210
The London Temperance League (which later became the National Temperance League)
actually invited Lees to give a public lecture to refute Lewes’s article in 1853, but they turned
away from the debate in 1856-7. Lees lamented the modifications Dr. Carpenter and others made
to their physiological theories after the publication of Lewes’s article. See F. R. Lees, “The New
Discoveries on the Action of Alcohol,”42.
211
Often justified by the words of Jesus at the Last Supper and his performance of the miracle in
the wedding at Cana.
212
F. R. Lees, “A Criticism: What is the True Relation of the Bible to the Temperance
Question?” in Lees, Essays Historical and Critical (London, 1853), 202-204.
94
But Lees did not go as far as to claim that there could be a separate or a higher truth
revealed by science, which was not covered in the Scriptures. For him, Truth (always with a
capital “T”) was self-evident, unitary, and absolute, and science and Scripture would always
harmonize and reveal the same “objective” truth. 213 The Bible was “but a book,” but it was also
“the medium of a Revelation of inspired and inspiring Truth to the World.” On the one hand, it
must be studied, just like any other book, with “the application of various principles and
processes of criticism to interpret its true sense.” 214 On the other, whenever an interpretation of
the Book was shown to be contradictory with science or reason, the contradiction could not
possibly have any bearing on the validity of the Revelation itself, and it must necessarily be the
result of a human error in interpretation, either biblical or scientific. For Lees, “God can not
contradict himself. He may be the author of a progressive revelation, but not of a contradictory
one. He may give at first a feeble light…but he cannot deceive.” 215 Therefore, the Inspired Truth
was infallible and prophetic, though gradually revealed through the medium of the Bible. On
questions such as teetotalism, the Bible could be shown to have “anticipated…the fullest witness
of Science,” and have “exhausted the teachings of human history.” 216 Lees’s work as a
temperance “harmonist” was thus to seek a more accurate interpretation of the Bible teachings on
wine (through philology) to show the consistency between scientific teetotalism and the Bible.
Lees’s belief in the harmony of science and Scripture occupied a middle ground between
Biblicism and scientific materialism. He showed confidence in the advancement of modern
213
F. R. Lees and Dawson Burns, The Temperance Bible Commentary (1868; 6th Eng. ed.,
London, 1894), xiii.
214
Lees, Essays Historical and Critical, xi, 202.
215
Ibid., 81.
216
Lees and Burns, The Temperance Bible Commentary, xxviii.
95
science and simultaneously in the progressive revelation of divine truth to keep up with the times.
Lees’s study of the Hebrew terms translated as wine in the Bible appears to be scientific in its
emphasis on linguistic and historical context (“to interpret the writers in the sense of their own
age, not of ours”). 217 But taken as a whole, his new exegeses were hardly objective and
sometimes obviously teleological. His premise combined the physiological thesis that alcohol
was poisonous for the human system with the Enlightenment faith that the Savior could not
possibly have taught the use of a poison with evil influence on the body and the mind, to form a
circular argument at times, especially in his treatment of the New Testament.
Lees’s radical (if logically flawed) biblical argument not only challenged the church
establishment, but his insistence on the consistency of the Old and the New Testament also went
against the evangelical mainstream. He objected to the evangelical view of the Old Testament as
“of an older and lesser dispensation.” He took issue with evangelicals’ skirting of the wine issue
in the New Testament. He was dissatisfied with the evangelical mode of persuasion that derived
specific moral duties from a general command (such as “Thou Shalt Not Kill,” or “Love thy
Neighbours as Thyself.”). 218 He was not exactly anti-clerical, but he was for thoroughgoing
reform and favored an assertive and innovative church leadership, and a ministry not weighed
down by church dogma or the tradition-bound congregation. The radical prohibitionists led by
Lees were asking for a total reform of church practices and Bible reading in keeping with
217
This shows the influence of 18th century Enlightenment biblical scholars, Jean Alphonse
Turrenti and Johann August Ernesti. For Turrenti and Ernesti, see Werner Georg Kümmel, The
New Testament: The History of the Investigation of Its Problems, trans. S. McLean Glimour and
Howard C. Kee (Nashville, TN and New York, NY, 1972), 58-61. Also for a discussion of the
theologians in the context of the Bible debate over slavery, see Robert Bruce Mullin, “biblical
Critics and the Battle over Slavery,” Journal of Presbyterian History 61: 2 (May 1983): 210-226.
218
Lees, Essays Historical and Critical, 81, 203-206.
96
advanced teetotalism. They argued for a teetotal Communion and even a teetotal Bible, a demand
that most church leaders, including the evangelically-inclined, were not prepared to meet. 219
Theories of Morals and of Government
As the push for legislative prohibition was slowly gathering momentum, the anti-teetotal forces
were rallying around a few prominent public men, notably Lord (Edward John) Stanley and John
Stuart Mill. Lord Stanley, M.P. and President of the Board of Trade under Prime Minister Lord
Palmerston, engaged in a debate in a series of correspondence with Samuel Pope, the honorable
secretary of the United Kingdom Alliance over the ethical and political bases for the Maine Law,
which was published by the London Times in October 1856. 220 Lees continued that debate with
John Stuart Mill, after the spokesman for the Liberal thought echoed and elaborated Lord
Stanley’s anti-prohibitionist arguments in his famous essay On Liberty.
In attacking prohibition, the “Liberal” (or rather, libertarian, in the modern sense) critics
articulated a moral and political theory that elevated the sovereignty of the individual over that of
the state or society and defined morality as primarily a personal, rather than a political or social,
matter. They were concerned about not only the resurgence of a totalitarian state, but also the
emerging threat of social and political democracy. It was in the individual that they believed that
the hopes of social and political reform could be realized. In essence, their ideology precluded
and was defined against collective social and political action. Social reform, for them, followed
219
Lees also suggested a philological and philosophical reexamination of the Bible on the issue
of slavery (parallel to wine), distinguishing man’s law from God’s sanction and correcting
mistranslations of “servant” as “slave.” See Lees, The Temperance Bible Commentary, 379.
220
See London Times, Oct. 2, 1856.
97
after the slow change of individual behavior and conviction, and individual reform in the
aggregate must precede political action in the form of legislation. 221
The Westminster Review argued that the increasing scale of social dependence and
organization of the modern era, paradoxically, threw the individual “more and more back on
himself” and taught him to cultivate his inner self (“to explore the recesses of his heart, and to
realize the existence of his own personality”). One could find in himself “a boundless sphere
entirely his own, a dominion which he seizes on with eagerness, a throne of which he proclaims
himself the lawful occupant.” In contrast to the vicissitudes of the external world one had little
power over, he assumed absolute sovereignty over the personal “dominion” and perfect control
of his own faculties. While the individual “lessen[ed]” in his connection with the external world,
his inner self became “infinitely greater” - “the consciousness of the value of his inner-life
colours every relation he fills, and every expression of his mind.” 222 Sobriety was but one of the
many conscious choices the exalted individual made for himself in accordance with his inner
conviction; and by inference, those who got drunk or who fell for temptations chose to do so,
when they could have refrained.
In this mindset, no laws should be allowed to supersede the right of personal choice and
any preventive measure must necessarily lead to moral debility. Prohibition was considered
worse than drunkenness. It was “a subtle poison,” which accustomed people to relying on
“external enactments,” thus “sapped the very foundations of right, and destroyed the springs of
221
This is different from the individualism born of evangelicalism – personal accountability to
God and spiritual independence and equality often in opposition to the mundane social hierarchy
of gender and race. This is individualism from a position of power, or elite (and masculine)
individualism.
222
Anon., “Drunkenness Not Curable by Legislation,” Westminster Review (new series) 8, no. 2
(Oct. 1855), 475-6.
98
all moral action.” 223 Some argued further that man must not do away with vice, as “[t]emptation
must exist before virtue can have its being.” Prohibition, by hindering one from vice, “equally
prevents him from attaining to virtue.” “Human reason” and “human volition” were “divinely
bestowed gifts, intended to be duly exercised in the acceptance or rejection of both good and
evil.” In the same way that the forbidden fruit was left within the reach of Adam and Eve, “no
external obstacle” must be placed “in the way of disobedience.” 224
John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, which appeared in 1859, 225 partly in response to the
U.K.A. campaign for pushing a local-option bill (the Permissive Bill) through Parliament,
provided a synthesis of Liberal attacks against the political philosophy of prohibition. He
contended that the prohibitionist argument of “social rights” (which, as he saw it, “ascribes to all
mankind a vested interest in each other’s moral, intellectual, and even physical perfection”)
could be easily abused to justify the enforcement of social conformity. He was particularly
worried about the “ascendant” middle class and the possible achievement of a middle-class
majority in Parliament, which would, following the American example, impose their ascetic
social and cultural values on the nation through such legislations as the Maine Law. 226
He recognized not only the existence of an autonomous domain of individual conscience,
but also a large realm of freedom for one’s private habit or conduct. Among such “self223
Ibid., 480. The Liberals here turned the tables on the teetotalers, who argued that alcohol was
poison.
224
National Magazine 2, no. 11 (Sep. 1857), 327-8.
225
Though published after the Gough v. Lees (1858), John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty and Frederic
Richard Lees’s responses to it are being discussed here because their (opposing) treatments of
the drink question were in essence a follow-up and an elaboration of the relatively short StanleyPope debate that took place in the columns of the London Times in October 1856.
226
John Stuart Mill, Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. J. M. Robson (33 vols., Toronto,
1963-), 18: 286-8.
99
regarding” acts or habits ranked the drinking of “fermented liquors” (Mill did not mention
distilled liquor), which he defended as an individual liberty that the state had no business
meddling with. Although the Maine Law, which prohibited sales alone, did not violate individual
liberty directly, Mill argued that it amounted to an interdict on personal use, because it severely
restricted public access. Mill defended the right to drink and to have access to drink, not the
unrestricted right to sell. It was the liberty of the consumers – not the sellers – that he insisted on
protecting. The only legitimate purpose of legislation, he claimed, was to prevent personal
conduct from injuring others or the society at large. 227 It followed that no one should be legally
punished for being drunk or be prevented from getting drunk, provided that in so doing he hurt
no one but himself.
Together, Mill and other Liberal critics of prohibition laid the theoretical foundation for
the ideology of individualism, which militated against collective and legislative solutions to
social problems. Indeed, they hardly saw drunkenness as a social problem, in which all had a
“vested interest.” They tended to individualize and privatize the issue and the solution. Mill
opposed any regulation aimed at influencing personal behavior (taxation being the only
legitimate purpose of legislation) and he believed in the efficacy of early education, which was
capable of shaping “rational conduct in life” and would obviate both legal punishment and moral
censure. 228 And he would have agreed with the National Magazine, which maintained that
227
Ibid., 288, 297-9. In On Liberty, Mill argued that no regulatory measure regarding alcohol
was legitimate and that licensing would only be justified on the grounds of taxation. BUT, as a
reviewer of On Liberty (possibly F. R. Lees) pointed out Meliora, 2 (1860), 91 that Mill was
supportive of regulatory measures in his earlier essay, Political Economy, where he implied that
taxation can be used to contain the tendencies of excess.
228
Ibid., 282.
100
“moral and spiritual restraints were alone deemed worthy of a morally and spiritually endowed
being by his Creator.” 229
The reform of the drunkard “must be in the man himself,” the Saturday Review argued,
“and what is true of the individual will be found equally true of a class or a nation.” Different
from America, it was suggested that in England, social vices “can only be remedied by private
enterprise.” 230 The Westminster Review proposed unrestricted licensing for all, beer and liquor
sellers, at an increased fee and let the market do the work of elimination (The Beer Act of 1830
had set a precedent, and Gladstone’s measure to reduce import duties on wine in 1860 shared the
same philosophy), while holding the publicans “pecuniarily answerable for all misconduct.”
Other than the market, people must rely on “the slow march of moral improvement” and avoid
“legislative short-cuts.” 231
It would be a mistake, as historian Brian Harrison pointed out, to see the philosophical
debate between the Liberals and the prohibitionists as a conflict between free traders and
regulators. 232 Many prohibitionists (including Lees) were followers of Adam Smith in areas
other than the traffic in alcohol (or slaves and opium). But this in no way discounts the
fundamental moral and political disagreements between the two classes of people.
The two sides had irreconcilable differences over their perception of the drinking issue
and the role of the state. The radical prohibitionists like Lees were invariably believers in the
229
National Magazine 2, no. 11 (Sep. 1857), 327-8.
230
Anon., “The Maine Liquor Law,” Saturday Review 2, no. 50 (Oct. 11, 1856): 524-5.
231
Anon., “Drunkenness Not Curable by Legislation,” Westminster Review, 483-4, 488.
232
Brian Harrison, “State Intervention and Moral Reform,” in Patricia Hollis, ed., Pressure from
Without in Early Victorian England (London, 1974). Brian Harrison cautions us against this
tendency by researching their stance on other social issues. And he sees the prohibitionists as
part of the constituencies for the Liberal Party.
101
poisonous nature of alcohol and the divine injunction against the use of intoxicating drinks,
whereas few Liberal philosophers deigned to make themselves acquainted with the teetotal
literature. Where the Liberals saw personal liberty and self-regarding acts, the prohibitionists
beheld social costs and social obligation. Contrary to the Liberal thinkers, the prohibitionists
considered the unrestricted access to alcohol, rather than its overuse, as the root problem. It was
the supply, they argued, that created the demand for alcohol in the first place. 233 Barring the
commercial production and sales of liquor (as against the home brew or private imports 234 ) was
for them the most effective way of curbing the supply. The prohibitionist goal was not to end
drinking once and for all, but to withdraw state sanction from a trade, which appeared to them to
be productive of social evils, and to create a safe environment for moral reform. It was not for
the sake of the drunkards who could not control themselves that the prohibitionists asked the
sacrifice of the many (contrary to the moral suasionists); they argued that it was rather for the
benefit of all, either directly by preserving the health of body and mind or indirectly through
lowering crime rates and poor taxes.
There were fundamental ideological differences between the radical prohibitionists and
the ultra-Liberals. The prohibitionists conceptualized personal liberty and its relationship to law
differently. Lees saw liberty NOT as an inherent freedom from obligations, but as an acquired
power. 235 The addition to one’s power (which he defined as liberty) occurred at the expense of
233
Christian News (Edinburgh), Aug. 15, 1857, “Fundamental Principles.”
234
This became the basis of attacks against prohibitionists by the Liberals who accused them of
making class legislation and by the moral suasionists for their doctrinal inconsistency. Both
charges are unfair, as neither reflected the real intention of the prohibitionists. The toleration of
home-brewing and imports was more of a tactical expedient.
235
In fact he distinguished the two words, freedom and liberty. See Lees’s review of On Liberty,
“Relations of Liberty to the Temperance Question,” Meliora 2, no. 8 (Jan. 1860), 345.
102
others (reflecting more or less a Hobbesian view). He argued that it was a historical “accident”
that liberty had been obtained “by battling against unjust governments,” which prejudiced the
public mind against law and state in general. Individual liberty should not, he argued, be defined
against government or its incidental (though inevitable) power of coercion; rather, in the making
of just laws, it was combined, equalized, and augmented for the benefit of all.236 Law did not
abridge personal liberty but defined and expressed individual liberty in the aggregate.
The prohibitionists believed in the broader obligations of the state in shaping social
morality and enforcing moral laws. 237 The government was not to be “mere policeman and taxcollector” (as the Liberals contended); rather, it should be a “moral power” and should exercise
its moral influence through law-making. It should intervene (as in the act of abolishing drink
selling) to promote the “natural” 238 development of the “higher powers” of man, to enlarge “all
our most valuable secular liberties,” and to curb the freedom leading to the “lower and baser
appetites of our being.” 239 Instead of leaving moral matters to the church or the school, the
prohibitionists expected the government to provide moral leadership and moral sanction. They
valued the “declarative,” as much as the “coercive” power of law. What they envisioned was not
a welfare state, but a righteous and assertive government.
236
Ibid., 345, 347.
237
Whereas the Liberals did not deny the necessity for the government to enact moral laws, they
did not recognize the new morality of teetotalism but only those that had been well “established”
over centuries and had been “customary.” See Mill, Collected Works, ed. John Robson, 18:281.
238
It was natural because “Man exists for the development of his higher powers, and society is
justified in its existence and limitations solely by the consideration that its order, method, and
machinery are essential to this end.” Lees, “Relations of Liberty to the Temperance Question,”
346.
239
Ibid., 346-7.
103
In the final analysis, the radical prohibitionists and the ultra-Liberals had very different
concerns regarding political democracy. The Liberal elite increasingly saw themselves as
becoming the political minority in face of the rising middle classes, and they were concerned
with the protection of the liberty of the minority against the tyranny of the many. The
prohibitionists, on the other hand, upheld majority rule as the core of democracy and envisioned
law as the embodiment of the political will of the majority. Whereas Mill valued human
development “in its richest diversity,” 240 Lees cared more for the cultivation of its “highest
nature.” 241 Even though prohibition was repeatedly labeled class legislation by its Liberal critics,
it would be wrong to assume that the law targeted the laborers only. The wine-drinking
gentlemen, after all, were the most vocal opponents of the Maine Law. The prohibition program,
which was finally introduced in the form of the Permissive Bill (which required a three-fourths
majority of rate-payers/voters to enact a prohibitory law in each parish or town) contained
elements of social control, but perhaps more importantly, an agenda of popular democracy and
social uplifting.
Radical prohibitionists like Lees sought not only to influence mass behavior, but they
considered prohibition and mass sobriety as the basis for intellectual elevation and suffrage
extension and as the guarantee for the rational exercise of individual political power. 242 More
often than not, Lees was trying to enlist the combined moral influence of the majority against
social injustices and political atrocities:
If a large number of individuals…speak [our minds against wickedness in high places,
whether secular or ecclesiastic], then in time, Republican slaveries, British opium trades,
240
Mill, Collected Works, 18: 215. Mill quoted Wilhelm von Humboldt.
241
Lees, “Relations of Liberty to the Temperance Question,” 345.
242
Ibid., 348-9.
104
Neapolitan atrocities, and Perugian massacres will cease to be – burnt up in the full blaze
of the public opinion of the civilized world. 243
Prohibitionism as represented by Lees was reminiscent of the Puritan commonwealth, 244
but it nonetheless had a strong populist strain. Though Mill’s style of Liberalism did not
distinguish the individual freedom of the gentleman and that of the common laborer, it was
nonetheless infused with a strong dose of elitism. The backlash against the Maine Law in the
metropolitan press shows indubitably that the elite wine-drinkers were worried and irritated by
the ascendancy of a “puritanical” provincial middle class, who threatened to transform the
political and social culture of Britain.
Retreat from Prohibition, or Moral Suasion v. Maine Law
Did the physiological, philological, and political debates change people’s minds in any particular
direction? Apparently, the war of words did little to sway either the diehard prohibitionists or
their wine-drinking opponents, but only hardened their respective positions. But the public
controversy had a discernable impact on the politically conservative evangelical entrepreneurs in
the temperance movement, people like Thomas Knox, William Tweedie, Samuel Bowly,
William Wilson, and Robert Charleton – leaders of the Leagues who had invited Gough to
lecture in Britain and to convert respectable society. 245 It was because of the divisiveness of the
243
Ibid., 351. “Neapolitan atrocities” referred to King Ferdinand II’s brutal crackdown on the
1848 revolution in Sicily, and “Perugian massacres” to the massacre of Perugian civilians by
papal troops in July 1859.
244
Brian Harrison pointed this out in his Drink and the Victorians, 194.
245
Thomas Knox was the owner of a large upholstery firm in Edinburgh (Knox, Samuel &
Dickson), president of the Edinburgh Total Abstinence Society and vice president of the Scottish
Temperance League. He led the moral suasionist attack against the United Kingdom Alliance in
1856 in the Glasgow Commonwealth. He took a moderate stance on the question of teetotalism
in the church and took care not to offend respectable church members with radical principles. He
was known to be involved in promoting temperance education in schools. Lees believed Knox to
be an instigator of the libel suit. William Tweedie, born in Scotland, was Gough’s manager and
105
Maine Law issue – especially the showing of strong dislike on the part of the respectable – that
the evangelical teetotalers backpedaled to the relatively safe ground of “moral suasion” in late
1856 to early 1857. By abstaining from immediate political action, the moral suasionists hoped
to free themselves from the taint of fanaticism and sever the ties between them and the radical
prohibitionists. In a sense, the public controversy over the Maine Law succeeded in redrawing
the battle line and shifting the limelight from teetotalism to prohibition (from a confrontation of
teetotalers versus drinkers to that of prohibitionists versus anti-prohibitionists). Gough wittingly
played a key role in this paradigm shift.
Despite their insistence on personal teetotalism, it is surprising to find how familiar the
moral suasionists sounded, when arguing against prohibition, vis-à-vis the Liberals. In fact, it is
most likely that the Liberal criticism of the Maine Law had informed the moral suasionist
arguments. William Tweedie, editor of the Weekly Record and manager of Gough’s tours,
compared the Maine Law to a “hot-house” and lamented the moral lethargy induced by the
shelter of legal prohibition. For him, the Maine Law became not only detached from but
detrimental to the moral struggle. The American lesson, as shown in Gough’s “dead letter,” was
that even when the national opinion favored a prohibitory law, there could be danger in its
promoter. He was the head of the London temperance publishing firm, William Tweedie & Co.,
and the secretary of the National Temperance League. He also chaired the Temperance
Permanent Land and Building Society, which provided saving and mortgage lending services for
its members of pledge signers. He was known to be the chief exponent of the “expediency”
doctrine (that drinking was no sin and abstinence was but expedient). Samuel Bowly of
Gloucester, Robert Charleton of Bristol, and William Wilson of Mansfield were all League
officers, evangelical Quakers, and wealthy businessmen-philanthropists. They would later supply
Gough with the incriminating evidence for his libel suit against Lees. See Winskill, The
Temperance Movement and Its Workers, 3: 30, 90-92, 102-4; also Brian Harrison, Dictionary of
British Temperance Biography(The Society for the Study of Labour History, 1973); and
Elizabeth Isichei, Victorian Quakers (Oxford, 1970).
106
realization. “Emphatically,” he claimed, “the hour of triumph is the hour of danger.” 246 Whereas
the political and the moral movements used to be considered complementary and mutually
beneficial, the enactment of a prohibitory law would now (following the Liberal logic) lead to
the slackening of moral vigilance and the undoing of the moral effort. It is noteworthy that the
new preoccupation with moral education originated only a few months earlier in an early 1857
issue (Vol. 2) of the Weekly Record, where Tweedie recommended Thomas Knox (of the
Scottish Temperance League)’s anti-U.K.A. “Auld Reekie” letters published in the Glasgow
Commonwealth. 247
Rev. Theodore L. Cuyler, a close associate of Gough’s and a Presbyterian minister from
New York City, who used to preach at rallies for prohibition, now (in Nov. 1857) cautioned the
temperance men against making political alliances at all. 248 “The mingling of moral movements
with party strifes at the ballot-boxes in America,” he argued, “has been a Pandora-box of
mischief to the cause of reform.” The politicization of moral reform gave rise to mercenary
motives: “Demagogues” rode temperance “as a ‘hobby’ into office.” Perhaps more importantly,
the political turn of the movement eroded the leadership of the church: “[T]he formation of a
Temperance political party to a great degree muzzles the pulpit.” 249 To disentangle the
246
Weekly Record (London), Aug. 8, 1857, “Hot-Houses.”
247
This “first landmark” of the moral suasionist turn of the Weekly Record was recounted by
John Turner Rae in The Temperance Record: A Monthly Review of Work and Progress,
Literature and Science 1, no. 1 (New Series, Jan. 1903), 2. “From the time of this reference (to
the ‘Auld Reekie’ letter) until now (1903), the pages of the Record have been largely occupied
with the progress of the educational work, first of the National Temperance League and then of
the Band of Hope Union and the Church of England Temperance Society, which is today in a
highly organized condition as regards the schools.”
248
See Richard J. Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America (New Haven,
1993), 216. Cuyler arrived in England on Gough’s heels.
249
Weekly Record (London), Nov. 14, 1857, “Letter From New York.”
107
temperance movement from party politics and to revive moral suasion was, in other words, to
bring the influence of the (non-conformist) church to bear on moral reform once again.
The editorial attitude of the Scottish Review (Glasgow), the organ of the Scottish
Temperance League, shifted perceptibly against prohibition in 1857. While the journal (like its
sponsoring organization) had always been moral suasionist in focus, it had rarely taken an openly
antagonistic stance on prohibition and had even defended it (as the teetotal pledge for a nation)
against attacks from the Westminster Review. 250 In July 1857 (two months after the publication
of the “dead letter”), however, the tone of union and cooperation turned into “aversion.” The
journal issued a direct challenge against the prohibitionists in the guise of a rave review for Rev.
Thomas Guthrie (a popular evangelical preacher)’s The City: Its Sins and Sorrows. The review
singled out for praise Thomas Guthrie’s levelheadedness on the temperance question and his
advocacy of church-centered reform (“His main hope lies in the self-denial of the church”). It
was a public statement of the journal’s break with radical prohibitionism. 251
The enactment of prohibitory laws, the Scottish Review argued, not only required the
molding of a favorable public opinion, as the U.K.A. advocated, but must be proceeded by the
general transformation of personal habit and practice (sounding a lot like the Westminster
Review’s “slow march of moral improvement”). 252 The editor declared his “aversion to an
immediate agitation for a prohibitory law” and warned against the revival of an uncompromising
250
Anon., “The Tactics of Temperance,” Scottish Review 4, no. 13 (Jan. 1856): 64-79.
251
Anon., “The Temperance Movement and the Question of Policy,” Scottish Review (July.
1857): 260-273.
252
“Drunkenness Not Curable by Legislation,” Westminster Review, 483-4. The question is
whether prohibition would still be necessary if the teetotal habit prevailed, as the moral
suasionists demanded. See “Mr. Gough’s Defense,” Journal of the American Temperance Union
(Sept. 1857): “If it be meant that no law should be created until there will be no opposition to it,
then none ever will be created, especially one touching the interests and appetites of men…”
108
“Chartist spirit” in the temperance circles. He chided the “enthusiastic and impractical bent of
mind” and advised the temperance men to “gratefully” receive from the legislature “what ever
can be got” and to ask only for “what is likely to be got.” The root of drunkenness for him lay
not so much in the drink itself, but in the love of “sensuality.” Therefore, forced abstinence
would only remove the “vice” of drunkenness but not the “sin”; and the prohibition of the drink
traffic alone would only lead to other forms of “sensual indulgence.” The cure had to start with
the change of “taste” and with the development of the power of “self-restraint” and “selfgovernment.” While prohibition dealt primarily with the traffic and public drinking, the review
complained, it did nothing to curb home brewing and home consumption. And it was the “family
circle” and the moral sanctuary of the home that the church reformers were primarily concerned
about. 253
Amidst the enmity and disputes surrounding prohibition, Gough shrewdly steered clear of
the issue in his opening speech in Exeter Hall on August 25, 1857. He took pains not to give
offence to his listeners. 254 Humoring the Liberals, he packaged personal abstinence as a
“Christian liberty,” making it a choice, rather than a moral or social obligation. Conceding the
biblical and the physiological legitimacy of wine-drinking, he recited the moral suasionist mantra
that it was “true liberty to deny myself of that which is positively lawful, if by that self-denial I
can save one of my brethren from that which maketh him to sin” (Roman 14:21). Appealing to
253
Anon., “The Temperance Movement and the Question of Policy,” 268-270.
254
This was noted in Christian News (Edinburgh), Nov. 21 1857 and Cornwall and Devon
Temperance Journal (Falmouth), Oct. 1858.
109
the evangelicals, he preached temperance as a human instrumentality to do God’s work and
emphasized the “bond of living faith” connecting man and his Maker. 255
There was apparently no sin in drinking per se but for “its influence on the brain or
system.” The question thus became “the ability of the man to stand it” and some obviously could
withstand the influence better than others. Abstinence for these moderate drinkers became
another form of philanthropy, of the strong-willed and benevolent men sacrificing their rightful
cup to set an example for the weak-minded. 256 Gough invoked his own experience of being
reclaimed from the street by a stranger. But most of his stories taught that people did not have to
look beyond their family circles and that they were not saving random strangers in the streets but
their sons and their bosom friends, the middle and upper class young men (e.g. the YMCA
youths). Family-centered abstinence involved the minimal (and most expedient) sacrifice of
taking wine off the dinner table, and it required no controversial social or political action.
The moral suasionists made it clear that their teetotalism was “no Asceticism” and it
consisted not in the dry facts of physiology, philology, or political philosophy. The temperance
men were, instead, “the merriest of the merry, the lightest of the light in heart.” 257 Like the
evangelical preachers, they impressed not only by “PROVING” but also through “PAINTING”
and “PERSUADING.” They addressed not only the “Reason” but also the “Fancy” and the
255
For a full report of Gough’s Exeter Hall speech on “Christian Liberty,” see Weekly Record
(London), Aug. 29, 1857. The speech was reprinted in many other papers and published
separately as a pamphlet.
256
Ibid.. The idea of “philanthropic abstinence” had been explored by Prof. James Miller,
“Abstinence and Its Place,” in Lectures Delivered Before the Young Men’s Christian Association
(1857; 2nd ed., London, 1857), 323. Rev. Thomas Guthrie touted Miller’s lecture as reflecting the
true sentiments of the temperance reform in The City: Its Sins and Sorrows (Edinburgh and New
York, 1857).
257
James Miller, “Abstinence and Its Place,” 312.
110
“Heart.” 258 Indeed, their style of temperance advocacy was more palatable to the society as a
whole. Condescending as it was toward the temperance literature in general, the metropolitan
press, such as the Saturday Review, found the League publications by comparison “sprightly,”
showing “the poetic and imaginative side of the teetotal mind,” and occasionally one or two
(temperance tales published by William Tweedie) that were “readable,” “well written,” and “free
from the intolerance so common in the class of works to which it belongs.” 259
Gough v. Lees: Moral Suasionist Goes to Court
Gough’s “dead letter” came on top of a wave of negative feelings toward the Maine Law, and it
jolted already frayed nerves within the teetotal ranks, let alone giving publicans and drinkers
something to cheer about. It was emblematic of the betrayal of the prohibition cause by
temperance men, who, “once in earnest,” now bolted under the pressure of respectable opinion,
for fear of giving offense to the leading members of their churches and communities. 260 The
publication of Gough’s bleak report was immediately recognized by the Alliance men as a ploy
of the Leaguers to scuttle the Maine Law campaign in Britain and to counter the effects of Neal
Dow’s recent visit. Lees and his fellow prohibitionists in the U.K.A. mounted vehement protests
against the “dead letter” and questioned the authority and veracity of its author.
Gough did not land in the fray unprepared, either. He came ashore laden with a chest of
“documents,” which he had solicited from American “authorities” on the failures of the Maine
Law, and sixteen letters were selected to be read at his welcome meeting in Liverpool to certify
258
A J. Symington, Thomas Guthrie: A Biographical Sketch (London, 1879), 142.
259
Anon., “The Temperance Press,” The Saturday Review 6, no. 125 (Dec. 25, 1858): 641-3. C.f.
Dickens’s satire of the Gradgrind system and his eulogy of “fancy” in Hard Times.
260
See Christian News, July 4, 1857 and Nov. 7, 1857.
111
the validity of his “dead letter.” 261 The British prohibitionists also set their agents to work on the
other side of the Atlantic, gathering evidence of the workings of the Maine Law in different
states. Peter Sinclair of Edinburgh, who used to own a temperance hotel in the city and who had
just arrived in New England in early 1857 to lecture for the children, became the U.K.A.’s chief
canvasser and correspondent in America, and he was responsible for collecting counter
testimonials against the “dead letter” and forwarding them to the prohibitionist press. 262
The “dead letter” controversy took a personal turn, when the Edinburgh News published a
report (attributed to none less than Thomas Knox of the Scottish Temperance League), which
accused Peter Sinclair of having fled Edinburgh in debt (leaving his family to subsist on charity)
and of defrauding the “Yankees” by pretending to be a reverend (while “abusing the Scottish
Temperance League and Mr. Gough”). 263 A large number of the particular issue of the
Edinburgh News made it across the Atlantic “in covers directed in a female hand [supposedly
Mrs. Gough’s], well known to persons in Massachusetts and Connecticut,” and the article was
said to have been reprinted in the Boston Congregationalist, owned and edited by Gough’s
friends, much to the detriment of Sinclair’s character and work in America. 264
261
“Mr. Gough in England,” Weekly Record, Aug. 1, 1857.
262
Biographical information on Peter Sinclair is scarce. He was known to be associated with the
Band of Hope, a children’s teetotal society, in Britain. He was committed to pushing prohibition,
but like other prohibitionists, also exhorted moral effort. He was also the author of an antislavery pamphlet later to be published in London during the American Civil War. See Peter
Sinclair, Freedom or Slavery in the United States: Being Facts and Testimonies for the
Consideration of the British People (London, 1863).
263
“Rev. Peter Sinclair,” Edinburgh News, Nov. 7, 1857. Thomas Knox’s authorship was
identified in “Mr. Sinclair,” Journal of the American Temperance Union and Prohibitionist
(New York), Jan. 1858.
264
Gough would later deny in court that he sent any paper to the Boston Congregationalist.
However, it turned out that he did (or Mrs. Gough did) send the particular issue of Edinburgh
News to a few friends of his (though not to Mr. Dexter, the editor of the Congregationalist), for it
112
In retaliation against this perceived personal attack on a U.K.A’s agent, Lees wrote an
angry letter to William Wilson, an officer of the National Temperance League and a friend of
Gough’s, threatening to publish information against “ST. BARTHOLOMEW” (of his supposed
opium-eating habit) unless Gough and the Leaguers publicly retracted their charges against “Rev.
Peter Sinclair.” 265 The rumor about Gough’s intoxication by drugs and the insinuation of his
periodic “blues” had been afloat (no doubt partly owing to the prohibitionists) in London and
Glasgow, but Lees’s letter was one of the first pieces of hard evidence the Leaguers could get
their hands on. 266 It was even better for Gough’s allies that Lees had been the leading apologist
for the Maine Law movement, an outspoken critic of the moral suasion party and Gough’s “dead
letter,” and an ardent defender of Peter Sinclair. Therefore, when Gough decided to press libel
charges against Lees in a court of law on the advice of his League friends (ignoring calls for an
extra-legal arbitration by a private temperance tribunal), they had picked their target with care. 267
contained a rave review of his own lecture. Maine Temperance Journal and Inquirer (Portland,
ME), n.d., in News Clippings Oversize Vol. 1 (British Newspapers, 1853-58), Gough Papers
(American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, MA): “All the persons, who have received the papers
in this country, know very well to whom they are indebted for the favor.” Lees mentioned the
reprint of the Edinburgh News article in the Boston Congregationalist (see Lees to William
Wilson, Dec. 25, 1857), but I have not been able to locate it. The Congregationalist did refer to
the article and urged investigation of Sinclair’s character on Dec. 4, 1857. It is unclear whether
Mrs. Gough was really the “female hand,” but there is plenty of evidence in the Gough Papers
that she often wrote (and signed) letters on behalf of her husband.
265
Lees wrote in a letter to Wm. Wilson, Dec. 25, 1857: “The ‘Saint’ has been often intoxicated
with drugs (twice to my own certain knowledge) – once insensibly so in the streets of London –
many time in Glasgow until he was helpless.” See “The History of the Case – ‘Gough v. Lees’”
in News Clippings Oversize Vol. 1 (British Newspapers, 1853-58), Gough Papers.
266
Apart from Lees, the owner of the London Hotel in Glasgow also spread word of Gough’s
intoxication. Lees to Wilson, Jan. 4, 1857, in Ibid..
267
They first sought a case for criminal libel at the Court of Queen’s Bench on April 22, 1858 in
vain, and then at the Court of Exchequer in London for a civil case. By insisting on going to
court, they brushed aside the repeated calls for a private tribunal formed by temperance men to
113
The trial of Gough v. Lees, which began with much fanfare on June 21, 1858 and ended
abruptly on the same day, was rather anti-climatic when placed in the course of events that
informed the temperance controversy. Throughout the trial, Gough, the plaintiff, was never
cross-examined by the defense counsel, and was allowed to testify on oath for himself guided by
his own counsel. 268 No witnesses were called, even though fifteen (whom Lees brought to court)
were present. The plaintiff’s counsels were able to stall the defense’s requests for the crossexamination of William Wilson, a key witness in the libel case, who had placed the incriminating
letter of Lees containing the libel in the hands of the prosecution, and for the admittance of
Wilson’s letter to Gough communicating the libel, as evidence. Lees, the defendant, never had a
chance to be examined in court. The trial, which was expected to last a few days, was concluded
rather hastily (reportedly in about fifteen minutes), partly because the defense counsel (Mr.
Kenneth Macaulay, a last-minute replacement for Mr. William Bovill, Lees’ main counsel)
considered his client’s case to be unwinnable based on available evidence, and amidst confusion,
he agreed to a retraction of the charges against Gough on Lees’ behalf in exchange for lower
damages, believing it to be in the best interest of his client. 269 Lees would declare after the trial,
however, that he did not give his consent to the agreement reached by the counsels on both sides.
investigate Lees’ charges, and showed (ironically) their faith in law. See Leeds Mercury, April
24, 1858.
268
Gough tried to use his diary to defend himself, as he did during the 1845 scandal, but it was
brushed aside by the court. John B. Gough, Autobiography and Personal Recollections of John B.
Gough (Springfield, MA; Chicago; Philadelphia, 1869), 423.
269
“Gough v. Lees,” Alliance Weekly News, June 3, 1858; Macaulay’s letter in Autobiography
and Personal Recollections, 429. Macaulay tried to defend Lees on his motive (he did not have
malicious design against Gough and was not going to expose Gough anyhow) and on the private
nature of his communication to Wilson (that Lees thought he was only writing to a private friend
of Gough’s).
114
The specific circumstances that shaped the outcome of the trial were murky at best, but it
was made clear from the onset of the trial that the factional conflict between the moral suasion
and legal suasion parties was “essential” to understanding the libel case at hand. 270 The trial
records, published in full by the Weekly Record and widely reprinted, re-acquainted the public
with the “dead letter” controversy and reaffirmed each organization’s distinct (and opposite)
position on the Maine Law question.
The Leaguers took the outcome of the trial as nothing less than a total triumph and
vindication of Gough’s name (“He is now beyond suspicion” 271 ) and of the moral suasion party.
The recrimination, however, did not end there. The temperance journals on the opposing sides
continued to publish and refute “evidence,” which had not been examined in court. It seems that
Gough had won his libel case on technical grounds in court but would still have to pass through
the trial of a self-constituted public tribunal. The prohibitionists and sympathizers rallied around
Lees and published pamphlets to undermine Gough’s case. Lees himself issued a retraction of his
retraction, and assisted in preparing and circulating a pamphlet about Gough’s 1845 scandal. 272
So vexed were Gough and his League friends by the bad press, even after his recent
vindication in court, that Rev. Horace James, minister of the Worcester (MA) Old South Church
and a close friend of Gough’s, who was probably present at Gough’s trial in London, returned to
270
Here is a report on the confusion in London Times, June 22, 1858, “From the London
Correspondent”: “Mr. James rises to express his willingness to agree to any reasonable proposal
to which Mr. Macaulay may assent; a stream of cross-talk, most of which is inaudible, strains the
attention and excites the curiosity of the spectators – a crisis however brought about, is felt to be
at hand, though the small finger of the clock does not point to one; Mr. Macaulay, in an apparent
confusion of mind and resolution, says what he attempts to unsay immediately after.” Also, see
Gough, Autobiography and Personal Recollections, 407, 418.
271
Weekly Journal of the Scottish Temperance League (Glasgow), June 26, 1858.
272
Anon., Gough’s Account of His Relapse (n.p., n.d.), in the James Black Temperance
Collections at the New York Public Library.
115
America in late 1858 to start yet another testimonial in order to shore up the character of the
beleaguered lecturer. The list of names that Rev. James secured on the testimonial and sent over
the Atlantic represented a number of American evangelical ministers (including the Beechers)
and manufacturers/financiers from all over the northern states; and he chose not to disclose the
names of those who had refused to sign or opposed the testimonial outright. 273 The American
prohibitionists, like Rev. John Marsh of the Journal of the American Temperance Union (now
the Journal and Prohibitionist), who had stood with Gough during the 1845 scandal, were now
conspicuously missing from the list of his supporters.
A Temperate Awakening
The evangelical retreat from political prohibition to (the safer ground of) personal and family
abstinence was neither an isolated incident nor a uniquely British phenomenon. It coincided with
the so-called Third Great Awakening of 1857-58 in America, which was set off by the stock
market crash in New York in September 1857 and was to spread across the Atlantic to inspire a
large-scale awakening in Britain in 1859. The revival was a landmark in many ways. Unlike
previous revivals, this one was centered in cities (marked by “downtown revivals”) and attended
heavily by clerks, merchants, and bankers. The awakening was orderly, organized around the
normal business hours, and it featured subdued masculine piety in noon prayer-meetings of
downtown churches. The revival realized the harmony between business and religion – “a
synthesis of business and religion,” according to historian Kathryn T. Long, in terms of
scheduling, employing business promotional methods, and finding religion in business. It
273
The selective publishing of the names of the respondents to the testimonial drive was
challenged by the Maine Temperance Journal (Portland, ME), Jan. 27, 1859. Letters that
responded negatively to Rev. James’s testimonial were not published, but are preserved in
Horace James, Correspondence, 1852-1870, Miscellaneous Manuscripts (American Antiquarian
Society, Worcester, MA).
116
stressed personal regeneration and piety and skirted all the controversial social reform issues.
The revivalists believed that “[a]ny needed social transformation would result from the
cumulative personal reforms of regenerate individuals and from the direct, supernatural
intervention of God.” 274 The revival was a reaction against the politicization of the evangelical
reform movements and the resulting inter-and-intra-denominational strife of the 1850s, and it
was supposed to be apolitical, ecumenical, and palliative. 275 It signaled a wholesale retreat of the
conservative (or Liberal) evangelicals at mid-century from political and social action, of which
the temperance schism that Gough was embroiled in formed a part. It was telling that Gough’s
clerical associates and defenders, such as Rev. Theodore Cuyler of New York and Rev. Horace
James of Worcester, MA, who had followed on Gough’s heels to Britain, returned home to
become leaders in this socially conservative revival. 276
The temperance schism started in the British movement, but quickly spread across the
Atlantic. In fact, Gough’s “dead letter” controversy and his subsequent court battle directly
caused the new rift in the American movement, thanks to his close ties with the American
orthodox evangelical churches. In November 1857, the Boston Congregationalist, the organ of
the Congregational church, suddenly opened fire on the Maine Law and its architect Neal Dow in
the wake of Gough’s “dead letter” controversy. The article declared that the Maine Law should
274
Kathryn T. Long, The Revival of 1857-58 (New York and Oxford, 1998), 82, 125.
275
See Richard Carwardine, Transatlantic Revivalism (Westport, CT and London, 1978), 159174.
276
Cuyler arrived in London in July 1857 and returned to New York after a brief stay, and he
became a correspondent for William Tweedie and his paper Weekly Record. He reported the
noon prayer meetings held in the business district of New York City and assured Tweedie’s
readers that despite the panic, the stocks of the Illinois Central (R.R.) remained “perfectly safe.”
See Weekly Record (London), Nov. 14 and 21, 1857. Horace James arrived sometime in early to
mid 1858 and stayed for six months, returning to America to start the testimonial drive for
Gough in December 1858.
117
have been repealed immediately but for “the general good of the cause.” It was not only a
positive restatement of the British moral suasionist position, but more importantly, a passionate
defense of Gough’s reputation and his “dead letter” argument. 277 At his trial, Gough denied
having been in correspondence with the Boston Congregationalist, or having had any friendship
with Rev. Henry M. Dexter, the paper’s editor, though he conveniently forgot to mention that he
was a good friend of the paper’s proprietors, Galen James, a prosperous ship-builder in Medford,
MA and his son Rev. Horace James, who may have been present in court that day. 278
Rev. James concluded that the Gough-Lees conflict was “unquestionably a religious war”
and “a struggle between the Christian and the anti-Christian, or Christian and un-Christian forces
in the temperance movement.” Gough was assaulted because he was “the acknowledged leader
of Christian and high-minded reform” and as a result of the “jealousy and ill-concealed aversion
upon evangelical and spiritual pleaders for the cause.” The recent split of the temperance
movement was for him a rite of “purification,” wherein the infidels or non-Christians were
“shaken off and dropped from the ranks.” 279 According to Rev. Dexter, the Boston
Congregational ministers staged a boycott of the Massachusetts State Temperance Convention
held in the city in September 1858, because some agents of the society were “as much opposed
to Orthodoxy as to intemperance” and they were “doing all they can…to prejudice the
community against Mr. John B. Gough, the latchet of whose shoes they are not worthy to
277
The Congregationalist (Boston), Nov. 27, 1857, “The Cause of Temperance.” The article was
also widely read in Britain.
278
Rev. Dexter, who was, according to Gough, no friend with him, was one of the signers on
Rev. Horace James’s testimonial.
279
The Congregationalist (Boston), Oct. 8, 1858.
118
unloose.” 280 The temperance alliance of American prohibitionists and evangelicals, who had
collaborated to return Gough to the platform after his scandal in 1845, was by all appearances
defunct.
From Temperance Reform to Moral Entertainment
The transatlantic temperance schism that pitted the moral-suasion revivalists against the proMaine-Law legalists was ultimately an outcome informed by the broader scientific, biblical, and
moral-political debates at mid-century and facilitated by Gough’s second visit to Britain. Unlike
in the American North, where it was relatively hard to find respectable folks openly aligned
against the cause of temperance and prohibition (whereas drinkers had always voted with their
feet), in Britain, prominent literary elite came out to defend the personal liberty and the
entrenched custom of (wine) drinking with reviews, editorials, and treatises against the potential
encroachment of a Maine Law, which they saw as evidence of the puritanical tyranny of the
Non-Conformist majority or the American “democracy.” The elite reactions against the Maine
Law agitation did little to change the views or advocacy of hardcore prohibitionists. If anything,
it gave the United Kingdom Alliance and its hotheaded agents like Frederic Richard Lees (who
may well have relished debates and oppositions) a chance to expose “errors” and to gain a public
hearing for their own views. It was the evangelical teetotalers (the gentlemen of trade and
ministers of Non-Conformist churches) and half-hearted prohibitionists who buckled easily
under the pressure of respectable opinion. While they retreated to the safer ground of
voluntarism and moral suasion, they could not leave the field quietly to the U.K.A. They had to
denounce political agitation as premature and self-defeating (no doubt, for the benefit of the
respectable society). Though Gough abstained from the theoretical debates, he was nonetheless
280
The Congregationalist (Boston), Sep. 30, 1858.
119
aware of the issues at stake. Employed by the moral suasionist Leagues to address the
respectable society, he changed tack (starting with the “dead letter”) to align himself more
closely with his patrons. He began to moderate his stance on the nature of alcohol. He not only
admitted to having used it as medicine, but treated the peculiarities of individual physiology and
temperament, rather than wine itself, as the cause of drunkenness. He sold abstinence as a
“Christian liberty” (as was drinking, though), an expedient choice of self-sacrifice at the family
table, not decreed by the Bible but not forbidden therein, either. Despite his preaching, he
attended dinners with wine drinking and toasting gentlemen well-wishers (though he and his
wife always declined using the wine).
Gough’s seeking redress against Lees in a court of law is rather ironic for him and his
friends who had professed a strong faith in moral suasion. The court battle between two of the
temperance movement’s best-known spokesmen certainly publicized the differences between the
two temperance factions and it personalized and dramatized the factional split. In retrospect,
Gough gained nothing from the trial but the ill will of the prohibitionists and his erstwhile allies.
His 1845 scandal, which he thought he had left behind, returned to haunt him as a result of the
trial. But his role in the British controversy led directly to the breaking up of the onceharmonious American temperance alliance for prohibition. His American friends followed their
British brethren in condemning political agitation and in reaffirming their commitment to
personal piety and family-centered private reform. For them, Gough had become the
embodiment of moral suasion and moderation (after they recruited him as an advocate for
evangelical legal suasion in the 1840s). Rev. Leonard W. Bacon of the New Haven First
Congregational Church, one of Gough’s partisans and once a temperance zealot, would come out
in 1864 to denounce teetotalism and the temperance movement itself (moral suasion or
120
prohibition) and urge a return to targeting and punishing drunkards. His well-known pamphlet,
bluntly titled The Mistakes and Failures of the Temperance Reformation, was dedicated
reverently to none less than Mr. John B. Gough. 281
Gough represented the evangelical, commercial, and light-hearted strain of temperance
reform, which had lost its radical edge by mid-century. Moral suasion as promoted by Gough
and his friends was, in essence, not very different from the studied Liberal opinion as
propounded by John Stuart Mill. Its highlighted voluntarism and gradualism offered no offense
to the entrenched social custom. In attempting to appear “respectable” and to privatize social
reform, the moral suasionists had lost their appetite for real change. From a broad-based social
reform, temperance was on its way of becoming paid moral entertainment for a selected audience.
For all his professed intellectual deficiencies, Gough read the public mood extremely well. After
a tumultuous tour, Gough returned to America in 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, and one of
the first lectures he chose to deliver was not on temperance (let alone slavery), but it was “Street
Life in London.” 282
281
Leonard Bacon would enter into a long public debate in the Independent (New York) with
John Marsh, the editor of the Journal of American Temperance Union and Prohibition in JulyNov. 1865. He was said to be an adherent of Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill. See Hugh Davis,
Leonard Bacon: New England Reformer and Antislavery Moderate (Baton Rouge, 1998), 144.
282
See Ch. IV for the transformation of Gough’s image after the second British tour.
121
CHAPTER THREE
The Paradox of the Anti-Theatrical Drama:
Dramatic Lecturing Defended and Justified
Visiting Paris for a second time in the summer of 1879, Gough stopped by the American Chapel,
a Protestant mission run by Rev. E. W. Hitchcock 283 , and was invited to address a contingent of
French workers through an interpreter. Rev. Hitchcock described for his readers in the New York
Evangelist what appears to be a comic scene created by translation, with the lecturer’s
“sentences…broken off in the middle, gestures arrested in mid-air, glowing thoughts interrupted
before the climax, illustrations coming out on the canvas in fragments – first an eye, then the
nose, the mouth, the chin, the brow, the face entire.” Though slow and spasmodic, Hitchcock
hastened to add, the lecturer’s power was not lost on his listeners: “[T]he French audience saw
and felt, and laughed and cried just as the English do.” 284
Despite the frequent reports of Gough’s lectures being “unreportable,” his unique ability
to move an audience was universally recognized and amply discussed by both his
contemporaries and later historians and biographers. 285 The Paris episode shows, in slow motion,
the lecturer’s pantomimic power in a situation where a rhetorical or an informational speech
would have certainly failed. It is equally important that Rev. Hitchcock chose to report the
speech in the New York Evangelist. He was hardly a disinterested auditor. Whether Gough’s
283
Rev. Hitchcock was a member of the McAll Association, a Presbyterian foreign mission.
284
New York Evangelist, Sept. 11, 1879.
285
Ibid., May 15, 1856. The cliché is that it was impossible to report Gough’s lectures in written
words and that the reader must hear the lecturer in person in order to appreciate his true
oratorical power. For modern scholars’ treatment of Gough’s lecturing style, see for example
Thomas Augst, “Temperance, Mass Culture, and the Romance of Experience,” American
Literary History 19:2 (Summer 2007), 297-323; and Amy Hughes, Spectacles of Reform:
Theater and Activism in Nineteenth-Century America (Ann Arbor, 2012), Ch. II.
122
speech did make as much of an impact on the French audience as described, we can be sure that
it had received the stamp of approval from Rev. Hitchcock. Such a report from the field, of a
celebrated lecturer who was known to have close ties with American foreign missions, was no
doubt intended to brighten up the prospects for the evangelical enterprise. In a way, it was Rev.
Hitchcock and a global network of evangelical ministers-cum-reporters who created the legend
of the sweeping success of the temperance speaker.
This chapter aims to peel back the rhetoric of adulation surrounding Gough’s lecturing
performance and illuminate the role of ministers, who doubled as reviewers and reporters, in
promoting the cult of Gough. The primary sources discussed in this chapter span the mid to late
19th century – the height of Gough’s fame. Critical stances (both positive and negative) on
Gough’s lecturing style seem to have changed very little in the half century, despite his post1860 attempt at broadening the range of his topics (see Chapter IV); the only exception was the
prohibitionists, who changed their minds about the lecturer after Gough v. Lees.
Modern scholars have treated the theatricality of Gough’s representation of delirium
tremens as a foregone conclusion, but a close study of his contemporary and posthumous reviews
reveals that the very “theatricality” of Gough’s performance had been a key point of debate. It
was no coincidence, either, that those who lauded Gough’s dramatic style and defended his
character were prominent ministers and leaders of large urban congregations. Considering the
revolving door between the pulpit and the rostrum throughout much of the mid and the late 19th
century, the ministerial support for Gough as a lecturer (and preacher) indicated something more
than personal loyalty and friendship. Gough represented a populist force, which the evangelical
clergy had come to embrace or tried to harness in order to adapt their religion to the new urban
settings of modern America. Their defense (and adoption) of Gough’s popular dramatic style and
123
their desire to retain the Puritan moral codes of the past gave rise to many paradoxes and at times
betrayed a sense of unease regarding their own evangelical methods. Whether they had contested
successfully with the flourishing entertainment industry and the advancements of modern science
by their adaptations or whether they had simply succumbed to secular influences and
commercialism is perhaps as lively a debate today as it was in the times of John B. Gough.
The Newfangled Oratory
Gough belonged to a new breed of orators, whose skills had been honed in the marketplace. His
style and appearance were a radical departure from the popular notion of classical oratory.
Gough did not strike his audience as charismatic. The first impression of the man was almost
always something of a “let down.” 286 He was “a spare, thin man…with a stature by no means
imposing.” 287 He had not the “classic head” and “nothing of the physique which common notions
associate with the orator.” 288 The “hirsute appendages” on his face – a beard that he started
growing in the late 1850s – may have added gravity to his looks, but had not erased the “Yankee
squareness and angularity” that came to be associated particularly with English immigrants to
America. 289
Gough’s voice was known for its pliability, rather than its stately rotundity. It was
marked by “liquid softness, pathos, and reach of compass.” In his early temperance career, he
both spoke and sang and would even “halt in the middle of his speech to sing a plaintive
286
Anon., “Sketches of Distinguished Orators,” Southern Literary Messenger 28, no. 11 (Mar.
1859), 178; Inverness (Scotland) Advertiser, Oct. 6, 1857.
287
Illustrated London News, Sept. 2, 1854.
288
Anon., “Sketches of Distinguished Orators,” 177; Inverness Advertiser, Oct. 6, 1857.
289
Banffshire Journal (Banff, Scotland), Oct. 13, 1857; Inverness Advertiser, Oct. 6, 1857;
Theodor Waitz, Introduction to Anthropology (London, 1863), 53.
124
song.” 290 He used to be able to move thousands to tears by singing alone. 291 In the later years,
his once musical voice became “husky and harsh” due to overuse, and it began to play second
fiddle to his physical drama. Moreover, he was said to have brought ventriloquism, a form of
popular stage entertainment for an actor to produce sounds and voices without appearing to be
speaking, into his oratory. 292
Critics noted Gough’s lectures as being “not regularly structured.” Instead of having “a
beginning, a middle, and an end in the orthodox style,” they were “a mosaic of metaphor,
anecdote, illustration, and appeal.” 293 He often opened his lecture with commonplaces and an
apology for speaking on the “hackneyed” theme of temperance. After abating audience
expectation, he brought his dramatic skills into play. Rather than merely relating a tale in the
third person, he “assume[d] respectively each character.” 294 He imitated their tones, accents, and
gestures. He was said to have “composed his own dramas, painted his own scenery with the
tongue, conducted his own dialogues,” and he “was a whole ‘stock company’ in himself.” 295 He
did not have a premeditated course of lecture, though he did have in store a repertoire of well
rehearsed stories (which he called “facts”) that he would draw on. As a rule, he interwove tragic,
290
New York Evangelist, Feb. 25, 1886.
291
Boston and New England Washingtonian, n.d., News Clippings Folio Vol. 1 (1843-1845),
Gough Papers (American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, MA).
292
New York Evangelist, Feb. 25, 1886; Anon., “John B. Gough: The Master of Dramatic
Eloquence,” Andover Review 5:29 (May 1886), 533; Gough used to be a “buffo singer,” i.e., a
singer of comic songs in theatre, including some “negro songs” at the Franklin Theatre in Boston.
See Musical World (London), Aug. 1, 1885.
293
Falkirk (Scotland) Herald, Dec. 31, 1857.
294
Anon., “Sketches of Distinguished Orators,” 179.
295
The Independent (New York), Mar. 4, 1886.
125
pathetic scenes containing moral lessons with humorous anecdotes intended for comic relief. He
was able to turn the audience’s mood so quickly that he was said to have “shortened the distance
between a smile and a tear.” 296
Much of Gough’s appeal in his mid to late career was physical drama. He enlisted every
part of his “lithe, nervous body” in his portraitures. 297 Frances E. Willard, president of the
Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, recalled vividly the lecturer’s play with his “restless,
eager hands, supple as India-rubber.” Gough even made use of his hair in dramatic
representations, “flinging [it] forward in one character, back in another, or standing it straight up
in a third.” It was said that “his very hair is expressive.” People observed that he “talked with his
coat tails” because he was in the habit of “doubling up” or “shaking” his coat tails “in the most
grotesque climaxes of gesticulation.” 298 He had no use for a podium or a reading stand; he never
read from a script and rarely stayed stationary. Defying the dignified postures commonly
associated with the orator, he “reel[ed], stagger[ed], and f[ell]… in delineation of his theme.” 299
“With a hop, skip, and jump” he would give chase to some imaginary bubbles he conjured up in
his speech. 300 Audiences marveled at his footwork – how he “goes it with his feet.” 301 And his
296
T. De Witt Talmage, T. De Witt Talmage as I Knew Him (New York, 1912), 164-5.
297
Inverness Advertiser, Oct. 6, 1857.
298
Anon., “John B. Gough,” The Outlook 117:2 (Sept. 12, 1917), 42; Anon., “John B. Gough:
The Master of Dramatic Eloquence,” Andover Review 5:29 (May 1886), 533.
299
Anon., “Notes and Gleanings,” National Magazine 3:13 (Aug. 1858), 185.
300
Anon., “John B. Gough,” The Outlook 117, no. 2 (Sept. 12, 1917); Erwin House, “What is
Eloquence!” The Ladies’ Repository 12:10 (Apr. 1852): 138-39.
301
Anon., “John B. Gough: The Master of Dramatic Eloquence,” Andover Review 5:29 (May
1886), 533.
126
movement on the platform (“pacing its length wise and cross-wise”) was by no means random
and suggests training in melodramatic acting. 302
Indeed, there was much in Gough’s oratory that resembled the melodramatic mode of
acting on the contemporary stage. Rather than putting inner thoughts into verse (what is called
“rhetorical acting”), the popular theatre of the 19th century “visualized” and “embodied”
sentiments. It illustrated the character’s emotional state by action and gestures and accentuated
sensational drama by creating “situations” or frozen scenes (tableaux) that minimized spoken
words. 303 Gough was, of course, no stranger to the popular theatres of New York and Boston,
and he served brief stints in low comedy parts and as a buffo singer. Gough was particularly
gifted in visualizing his characters (not just the drunkard). When he described a roofer looking
down from a narrow plank erected over the high church steeple, he produced a “shudder” as he
“looked down.” He played the character of a minister who fought the craving for drink by
locking himself up, and invited the audience to look at the (imaginary) “scars” on his face after
the harrowing struggle. 304
Gough’s performance was intended to stimulate the visual imagination of the audience
and to build up a scene or a dramatic moment. Therefore, people remembered his lectures not as
unconnected gestures and actions but as a “succession of highly-wrought scenes.” 305 Some
302
New York Times, Oct. 18, 1860. For the norms of melodramatic acting, see Conrad J. Bishop,
“Melodramatic Acting: Concept and Technique in the Performance of Early Nineteenth Century
English Melodrama” (Ph.D. Diss., Stanford Univ., 1966), Ch. II, esp. on “movement,” 135-149.
303
Martin Meisel, Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century
England (Princeton, 1983), Ch. 3.
304
“The Power of Habit,” 4, 8 in John B. Gough, Orations (London, 1878).
305
Inverness Advertiser, Oct. 6, 1857. For example, a reviewer recalled Gough’s lectures in the
form of “pictures” – of “the boy snatched from the burning house, whilst an agonized mother and
assembled thousands hold their breath in anxious fear; the devoted sister bathing in the deep cut
127
compared his lecture to a “beautifully varying panorama, passing in review before the audience,
constantly increasing in interest and effect to the last and closing scene.” Both his mimetic power
and his emotional play made his characters “tangible and material,” instilling a sense of detail
and realism into his depictions. “So perfect,” it was said, “are his personifications that you
almost imagine the actors of the scene before you.” 306
Gough’s physical and pictorial drama answered to the growing appetite of the audience
for visual entertainment. As Gough’s audience became increasingly “fashionable” over the years,
there had been a growing social distance between them and scenes of poverty and drunkenness.
“Dry statistics will weigh little with such people,” it was argued:
They must see the victim of intemperance reeling before their very eyes; they must be led
from their luxurious lounges to the coarse straw and seedy furniture of his hovel; they
must see his children growing up the embodiment of wickedness… All this, and such like,
must they see – either in living reality, or mirrored before them in words that will reach
their hearts…before they can be expected to give us the benefit of their example and
influence in the prosecution of our great enterprise. 307
This was the age of “Realist” novels (characterized by lifelike details and illustrations), pictorial
prints, and illustrated newspapers and magazines. The different forms of print media were part of
the visual (and commercial) culture that proliferated in the 19th century thanks to the
development of low-cost printing technology. Gough’s platform drama was frequently compared
to popular prints (such as the reprinted works of William Hogarth and the drawings of George
scar upon a drunken brother’s face; the wan and broken-hearted wife invoking Heaven’s blessing
upon her once cruel but now reformed husband; the arrival of the survivors of a shipwrecked
vessel at the wharf at New York, and the deep stillness and death-like stare of the vast multitude
as they look for some loved friend amid the ill-fated crew; the infatuated man who gives himself
up to the rapids of Niagara, and moves swiftly and fearfully on to the whirling gulf below.”
Anon., “Sketches of Distinguished Orators,” 180.
306
Anon., “Sketches of Distinguished Orators,” 179.
307
Weekly Journal of the Scottish Temperance League (Glasgow, Scotland), July 11, 1857.
128
Cruikshank) and scenes from Dickens’s novels. 308 His portraits became commodities both sold
as individual prints and reproduced in books and illustrated newspapers and magazines. And it is
no coincidence that Gough befriended George Cruikshank, the English political cartoonist turned
book illustrator and printmaker, and became an avid collector and promoter of Cruikshank’s
popular art. 309
Above all, Gough was a master in reading his audience. He was said to have “an almost
intuitive perception into the character of the audience.” 310 He was keenly aware of his
surroundings, the occasion, and the kind of audience he was facing each night, and he adapted
his lecture accordingly. On Sabbath evenings or when speaking from the pulpit, he would refrain
from “any reminiscences of a ludicrous nature” and focus on the pathetic and the terrible. 311 In a
speech delivered to the juvenile Band of Hope in London, he explained that the presence of
adults among the children, which he had not anticipated, made it “doubly difficult” for him to
“speak effectively,” and that as a result, he would divide his discourse into two parts, one
directed at the children and the other at the adults present. 312 Likewise, it was by gauging
audience response that Gough ordered his anecdotes and altered his telling. His best effort would
have been baffled by a reserved audience. Speaking extempore, he demanded spontaneous
308
Gough’s best scenes were said to be “equal to the best touches of a Dickens or Scott.” Anon.,
“Sketches of Distinguished Orators,” 180.
309
Gough collected Cruikshank’s pictorial works, including cutting out his book illustrations.
Cruikshank drew the famous temperance serial prints of The Bottle and The Drunkard’s
Daughter. Gough tried to raise funds in America to support the artist. See Robert L. Patten,
George Cruikshank’s Life, Times, and Art (2 vols., New Brunswick, NJ, 1996) 2:326-28, 403,
488; and John B. Gough, The Works of George Cruikshank (Boston, 1890).
310
Falkirk Herald, Dec. 31, 1857
311
John B. Gough, Autobiography (Boston, 1845), 149.
312
Gough, Orations, Delivered on Various Occasions (London, 1854), “John B. Gough’s
Address to Children, Dec. 28, 1853.”
129
responses from his audience. If it is true that no lecture of Gough’s was delivered twice alike, it
was because the audience had as much of a role in shaping the lecture as the lecturer himself. 313
Critical Stances
Though everyone seemed to agree more or less on the basic features of Gough’s lectures, their
verdicts on his style were as divided as were the debates on his character – indeed, the two were
inseparable. To some, Gough’s “lectures” looked too much like the popular theater to be taken
seriously as moral edification. Gough was considered an actor rather than an orator. His best
oratorical efforts may have baffled many an evangelical reporter of “lectures,” but they could
have never fooled the play-goers, who were familiar with the dramatic ploys and effects.
Gough’s most graphic depictions were likened to well played scenes from Hamlet or the best
stage portrayals by Adelaide Ristori, an Italian actress then popular in the English speaking
world. 314 The North British Mail remarked not without sarcasm that “[Gough] is so great an
actor that we are in doubt as to which is the greater – his loss to the stage, or his gain to the
platform.” 315
Others detested the anti-intellectual and populist tendencies of Gough’s sentimental
drama. George Gilfillan, a Scottish minister of the United Presbyterian Church and a poet and
literary contributor for the Eclectic Review (Glasgow), regarded Gough’s fame as an orator “a
blot on the age.” Gilfillan found the lecturer’s physical drama (his “vermicular twistings” and
313
Anon., “John B. Gough: The Master of Dramatic Eloquence,” Andover Review 5:29 (May
1886), 533: “To them (the audience) the old theme had the freshness of novelty, and their interest
was aroused in watching the growth of the subject as it developed under the influence of each
new audience.”
314
Adelaide Ristori’s popularity despite the language barrier evidenced, in another way, the
diminishing importance of spoken words in drama. See Marvin Carlson, The Italian
Shakespearians (Washington, DC; London; Toronto, 1985), Chs. 2 and 3.
315
North British Daily Mail (Glasgow, Scotland), Oct. 15, 1878.
130
“jumpings to and fro”) and his lack of original content (his “eternal self-repetitions” and
“barefaced plagiarisms”) “simply disgusting.” Gough’s popularity would “stamp indelible
disgrace” on his admirers and “do discredit” to his recommenders, including Mrs. Harriet
Beecher Stowe. At the heart of Gilfillan’s ire was his detestation of the public lecturing system, a
new commercial and populist institution that, as he saw it, demanded “clap-trap” more often than
sensible arguments and preferred “masters of sound and fury” to speakers of true intellect. He
advised an aspiring literary author to avoid public lecturing, lest he “vulgariz[e] himself by
coming down to the level of his audience.” The public lectures, according to him, suited only
“that class of persons who are anxious to acquire the reputation of knowledge, without the
trouble of study.” Though “a good substitute for the card table or the theatre,” public lecturing
was “of no great value” as “a means of intellectual improvement or moral culture.” For Gilfillan,
Gough’s dramatic style epitomized “the degradation of the platform,” and his popularity
reflected the intellectual and moral deficit of his followers. 316
The scientific prohibitionists, who opposed Gough in the Gough v. Lees trial, spoke
against the dumbing down of temperance lectures with “trashy” tales and sentimentalism. 317
Edward Grubb, one of the first Preston teetotalers and a close associate of Frederic Richard
Lees’s, deplored Gough’s “new mode of speech making… adapted to the weakest capacity”:
How easy it is to advocate a cause where neither conviction nor examination are
necessary to success – where the features of vice drawn from a wasted life, or the tricks
of the stage are more telling in the market than the simple beauties of truth and virtue. 318
316
George Gilfillan, The History of a Man (London, 1856), 250-1.
317
Frederic Richard Lees, An Inquiry into the Reasons and Results of the Prescription of
Intoxicating Liquors in the Practice of Medicine (London, 1866), 28.
318
Weekly Record (London, England), Sept. 26, 1857.
131
When deprived of the visual and sound effects impressed upon the brain by the eye and the ear,
Grubb concluded, Gough’s speeches were barren of meaning. There was no “settled design,” no
“drift,” but only “a profusion of wild, empty rapture, without sense.” 319 The excitement thereby
produced on the mind was, according to Frederic Richard Lees, temporary and counterproductive
to the inculcation of rational thought and intellectual conviction: “The crowds who had feasted
on excitement had no taste for the science of the Temperance movement; the stimulus of
histrionic ‘genius,’ had, like gin, the effect of destroying the appetite for normal food.” 320
But for those who had seen Gough through the crises of public confidence (in 1845 and
then 1857-8), Gough’s affective and illustrative power was superior to logic and argument. They
argued that Gough’s dramatic illustrations created “a deeper conviction of the truth of his
position, than would reasoning of the most consummate logician.” His gestures were not
superfluous to his speech, but were “so truly in harmony with the mind, as to give a living
embodiment to its ideas and thoughts.” 321 Gough’s lack of academic training was celebrated as a
preservative of his “natural” talent, which according to them could have suffered in “the
academic mill.” The absence of “self-consciousness” and “self-criticism” became a desirable
quality in the public lecturer, as without introspection (or rather with single-minded devotion), he
could deliver a lecture “as freshly and thrillingly, for the hundredth time as the first.” 322 For
these people, the goal was not necessarily to elevate the public intellect, but to make converts
319
Edward Grubb, Old and New Temperance Advocacy (Leeds, 1858), 26.
320
James Hutchison Stirling, Impressions on the “Gough-Lees Controversy,” (n.p., 1860), 111.
321
The Elgin and Morayshire Courier (Elgin, Scotland), Oct. 9, 1857
322
“Memorial of John B. Gough by George Henry Gould,” Worcester (MA) Daily Spy, April 20,
1886. This reference was kindly provided by Carol Damon Andrews, an independent researcher
of Gould’s life in Worcester, MA.
132
across different social classes and to fill the coffers of temperance societies. They were pleased
to see that Gough’s performance had proven successful not only with the lowly but with the
“high-born, and the wealthy, and the influential,” who would lend their resources to aid the
movement. 323
Despite the anti-intellectualism embedded in Gough’s drama, we must bear in mind that
the ablest defenders and promoters of Gough’s lecturing style were not street preachers and
small-town Finneyites. They were college-educated ministers of large urban congregations and
eminent professors at universities and theological seminaries. They not only practiced but taught
and theorized about preaching. Some of them may have been relatively close to the lecturer.
Henry Ward Beecher supported Gough during his scandal and libel trial and was reciprocated by
Gough’s public endorsement during the Beecher-Tilton affair. Theodore L. Cuyler, minister of
the Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn and a Princeton graduate, had known
Gough since the 1840s and was instrumental in the lecturer’s defense in the Gough-Lees
controversy. George Henry Gould, a Congregational minister of Worcester, MA, accompanied
Gough on his European tours.
Others may have been more or less acquaintances. Lyman Abbott, successor to Henry
Ward Beecher as pastor of the Plymouth Church and editor of several religious magazines, wrote
a long introduction for a collection of Gough’s lectures titled Platform Echoes and claimed to
have based his writing on public records rather than personal knowledge. Charles J. Little,
professor of logic and history at Syracuse University and a Methodist (later president of the
323
Weekly Record (London, England), Sept. 26, 1857. William Tweedie wrote in response to
Edward Grubb’s criticism of the theatricalization and the dumbing-down of temperance speeches:
“It may be that the public is much to blame – that it is poor stupid public – that if it would listen
to you and your friends it would hear infinitely better lectures, and gain infinitely more
knowledge. But what are we to do? It is this poor public with which we have to deal.”
133
Garrett biblical Institute of Evanston, IL), was the author of a rave review for Gough’s dramatic
oratory in the magazine The Chautauquan. Little was said to possess a “rare power of dramatic
presentation,” with which he could bring a great man to life “in a great way and yet in a
distinctly human way” 324 ; Thomas De Witt Talmage, pastor of the Central Presbyterian Church
in Brooklyn, whose popularity and pulpit drama rivaled Beecher’s, touted Gough’s legacy in his
autobiography; Edwards A. Park, a prominent theologian at the Andover Theological Seminary
and author of a controversial treatise on the “theology of the feelings,” wrote one of Gough’s
memorials, published in the New England Magazine.
In Gough, the ministers and professors commended not the common drunkard, but the
preacher. For them, Gough’s oratory was something more than a lay effort to remove an obstacle
to religious conversion; rather, it was implicitly religious and had a direct influence on the pulpit.
According to Rev. Gould, Gough had “contributed more by his public addresses to the cause of
Evangelical religion than any single pulpit in our land,” and his lectures contained “enough
gospel of late years, pure and unadulterated…to stock half a dozen average pulpit discourses.” 325
Rev. Talmage believed that Gough’s success as a lecturer “lighted new fires of divine passion in
our pulpits.” 326 Rev. Park argued that although Gough was not a “thoroughly read theologian,”
the “reverential spirit” he exhibited in prayers was a “touchstone for sound doctrine,” and he
believed that “[f]rom his familiar converse many well-instructed clergymen have derived fruitful
324
Charles M. Stuart, ed., In Memoriam: Charles Joseph Little (Chicago, 1912), 28.
325
Worcester (MA) Daily Spy, April 20, 1886, “Memorial of John B. Gough by George Henry
Gould.”
326
T. De Witt Talmage, T. De Witt Talmage as I Knew Him (New York, 1912), 164-5.
134
maxims.” 327 The ministers’ endorsement of Gough’s lecturing style suggested more than a
friendly bias but something of their notion of effective preaching suited to the urban ministry. In
describing and defining Gough’s drama, they were also justifying the new pulpit style they
envisioned and embraced.
Anti-Theatrical Drama
Despite their newfound appreciation for dramatic representation, the ministers remained adamant
in their belief that the theater was a school of vice. 328 They were not oblivious to the popular
criticism leveled against Gough’s theatricality. They wondered if people would go to hear Gough
as they would to see a play. They were even more worried that they (and the evangelical
churches) would be seen as patronizing a sort of Puritan theater - that Gough was but “the
favorite of audiences deprived by tradition and prejudice of the enjoyments of the stage.” 329
Therefore, it was imperative for them to distinguish Gough’s drama from what they believed to
be profane theatrical display. In fact, they went as far as to deny the very theatricality (and the
theatrical origin) of Gough’s lecturing, and endeavored to reinvent his drama as the polar
opposite of the stage version.
Unlike theatrical fiction, it was impossible, they argued, to separate Gough’s drama from
personal experiences, either his own or those of others to whom he bore witness. The realism of
327
Edwards Amasa Park, “Distinctive Traits of John B. Gough,” New England Magazine and
Bay State Monthly 5:1 (Nov. 1886), 3-6.
328
Theodore L. Cuyler, for example, found objections in the content of the plays (even in
Shakespearean classics), the character of the players on and off the stage, and in the “usual
accessories” of a play-house. Though allowing for the reading of drama “by the fireside” (as a
form of “Christian recreation”), Cuyler still regarded the theater as the main competitor against
the divine drama of the church. Cuyler, “Christian Recreation and Unchristian Amusements,”
The Pulpit and Rostrum, No. 1 (Nov. 15, 1858), 13.
329
Charles J. Little, “John B. Gough, 1817-1886,” The Chautauquan 9:5 (Feb. 1889), 286.
135
his drama derived from the reality of these experiences. Gough’s best acting was no play upon
imagination, but spontaneous reactions “to the recollection of actual experience.” 330 The
ministers reassured their readers (and themselves) that even in recollection no sense of reality
was sacrificed. Gough was capable of “realizing” an experience, a character, or a scene in his
mind so vividly that he reacted mentally and physically “as if he was undergoing the experience
with the exactness of reality.” 331 For them, Gough was reliving, rather than merely reenacting,
an experience. His drama was thus “fact, not fiction, made vivid to others because eternally real
and vivid to himself.” 332
Gough’s drama, the ministers claimed, was independent of the theatrical genre. In fact,
according to the dramatic preacher Rev. Talmage, Gough had “harnessed” the drama that was
once “prostituted” in the play-house, and had “raised” it for the “glorious uses” of temperance
and religion. 333 But Gough’s drama was no reformed theater. It was fundamentally antitheatrical. “His action, be it understood, was spontaneously dramatic, and never theatric.” 334 An
actor calculated each move for effect, according to the ministers, but Gough was “utterly
oblivious of acting.” Despite his being a great mimic, “the very moment he became conscious of
his mimetic power, it forsook him.” 335 His performance seemed “unconsciously ‘incarnated’
330
Ibid., 286.
331
Anon., “John B. Gough: The Master of Dramatic Eloquence,” Andover Review 5:29 (May
1886), 533.
332
Charles J. Little, “John B. Gough, 1817-1886,” 286.
333
T. De Witt Talmage, T. De Witt Talmage, 164-5.
334
Anon., “John B. Gough: The Master of Dramatic Eloquence,” Andover Review 5:29 (May
1886), 533.
335
“Memorial of John B. Gough by George Henry Gould,” Worcester (MA) Daily Spy, April 20,
1886.
136
with all seriousness of purpose,” and constituted a “spontaneous and self-forgetful expression of
Nature and Reality.” 336 To the ministers, Gough’s “careless” drama achieved better effects than
the best effort of the theatrical art; and yet it involved no deliberate “acting” and hence no risk of
deception or pretense. 337
The ministers’ defense of Gough’s drama as anti-theatrical was simultaneously an
endorsement of his character and that of his eager audience. Much of the difference between
Gough’s dramatic oration and the theatrical play, according to the ministers, derived from the
moral character of the performer and his audience. “[I]n the play-house men and women both
play and are known to be playing.” 338 The theater audience understood a play to be fiction and
they wanted to be amused by stage performance regardless of the true moral character of the
players. 339 In a sense, the audience were themselves players or participants in a game of
deception and self-deception, and their moral character was subject to the insidious corruption of
the theater. 340 In contrast, Gough’s dramatic oration aimed at the reformation of “conduct and
life.” And those who went to hear the orator saw him as the moral paragon and demanded
336
Anon., “John B. Gough: The Master of Dramatic Eloquence,” Andover Review 5:29 (May
1886), 533.
337
Banffshire Journal (Banff, Scotland), Oct. 13, 1857.
338
Charles J. Little, “John B. Gough, 1817-1886,” 286.
339
This is the key argument of the evangelicals against the theater. See, for example, Gough’s
own anti-theater speech cited in Christian Advocate (New York), July 7, 1881. Gough recalled
his “disenchantment” with the theater: “the unreality of it… the falsehood and fiction involved in
their [players’] profession, in seeming to be what they never were or could be, studying virtue to
represent it on the stage, while their lives were wholly vicious, repelled me.”
340
Little, “John B. Gough, 1817-1886,” 286. According to Little, the theater affected one’s moral
character “by subtle and unconscious influences, by a disturbance of its molecules such as those
of an iron bridge undergo when repeated jars and pressure crystallize them into disintegrating
brittleness.”
137
sincerity and congruity of word and action from him, “precisely when the speech is over.”
Gough’s earnestness in performance and (alleged) consistency of character thus guaranteed that
his lecture was no confidence game (despite its dramatic qualities) and that his audience were
different from regular play-goers.
The ministers were obsessed with Gough’s sincerity. They pointed to Gough’s selfabsorbed performance as evidence of his sincerity. “There is no turning to the chairman,” they
observed, “while his audience is flooded in tears, and saying, as did a certain popular actor to his
companion in the scene, without relaxing the features that had broken up the fountains of feeling,
‘Those people in the pit would be the better of umbrellas.’” 341 (In fact, this is exactly the kind of
“natural acting” that the famous English actor David Garrick championed since the 18th century
– that an actor should stay in the character on stage, even when they have no lines. 342 ) They
insisted that there was “no room for doubting the perfect earnestness of the man.” 343 Such
reassurances of the character of the man were often carried to the point of excess. Gough was
“charged with his own convictions to the very core of his soul, to his finger tips, to each
particular hair of his head and to the end of his coat tails.” “He was simple and guileless as a
child… He had a tenderness of nature surpassing woman’s.” 344 “Never in all his life,” the reader
341
William Reid, Sketch of the Life and Oratory of John B. Gough (London, 1854), 72.
342
Gillen D’Arcy Wood, The Shock of the Real: Romanticism and Visual Culture, 1760-1860
(New York, NY, 2001), Ch. 1.
343
Falkirk (Scotland) Herald, Dec. 31, 1857.
344
“He takes on the character, not as an actor puts on his part, but as a child assumes in quick
succession whatever is necessary to his childish sport.” Christian Union (New York), Feb. 9,
1881.
138
was told, “did he consciously utter a sentence or make a greeting simply for effect.” Moreover,
the ministers maintained, “he could not do it.” 345
More than giving verbal assurances, the ministers participated in Gough’s drama by
sanctifying his platform with their presence. It was common for Gough’s lectures to be prefaced
by a prayer led by the clergymen and closed with the singing of the Doxology. Needless to say,
many of his lectures were held on church venues. Some of the more elaborate events paraded
ministers and elite of the churches on the platform and even took on something of a liturgical
tone. 346
The ministers tried not only to legitimize Gough’s drama but to shape the aesthetic
experience of his audiences. 347 Gough’s performance was frequently described as having an
electro-magnetic effect. The rapid flow of his words gave off “electric sparks” and sent “electric
shivers” down the spine. 348 He had “magnetic eyes” and a “vast amount of ‘animal magnetism’
condensed in the heart and the brain,” and his audience was drawn toward him by an electro345
“Memorial of John B. Gough by George Henry Gould,” Worcester (MA) Daily Spy, April 20,
1886.
346
Some of them resembled a rite of ordination. See for example, report of Gough’s first lecture
in Glasgow in Weekly Journal of the Scottish Temperance League, Sept. 19, 1857; and Gough’s
farewell speech in Boylston, as reported by Boston Daily Bee, n.d., in News Clippings Oversize
Vol. 1, Gough Papers (AAS): “Dr. Paine (of Holden, MA) came forward and tendered to Mr.
Gough the right hand of fellowship in behalf of the clerical brethren present, and of the whole
brotherhood of Christians, bidding him God speed in his mission, and invoking a Divine blessing
on his labors. The whole assembly then rose, and led by the band, sang the Doxology.”
347
Available evidence in private diaries/correspondence suggests that Gough’s audience tended
to describe his lecture the same way the reviewers did, even using the exact same metaphors. See,
for example, Letter from Emeline E. Joslin Colony to Harriet Hall Johnson, Mar. 22, 1863,
Allen-Johnson Family Papers, 1759-1992 (Alexandria, VA, 2010), 1-4: “I have heard it assigned
as the reason of his exerting such power over an audience, that he is strongly charged with
negative electricity, and while the listeners are supposed to be positively electrified!”
348
Erwin House, “What is Eloquence,” 139; “Memorial of John B. Gough by George Henry
Gould,” Worcester (MA) Daily Spy, April 20, 1886.
139
magnetic pull. 349 The pundits tapped into the popular fascination with the telegraphic science
and mesmerism, and reshaped lecture-going as an embodied and simultaneously transcendent
experience. The new critical aesthetics concentrated on the lecturer’s impressions on the bodily
senses rather than the intellect of the audience. The lecture was to be felt corporeally (as an
electric shock) rather than to be cogitated upon. In the meantime, by inducing spontaneous
emotional outbursts and forging shared sensory experiences, the lecturer was able to create
something of a momentary suspension of individuality and turn his audience into one “colossal
individuality” and a single “organism, palpitating with a common life and a common purpose.”
350
And the lecturer was felt to be one of them:
[A]s he climbed one step after another, as he essayed yet higher flights, we bore up with
him, as if it had but one body, the living, breathing mass of humanity around. 351
To realize an emotional experience of the unity of individuals among strangers, the
lecturer also required the audience’s momentary suspension of disbelief and their spontaneous
response to his performance. The minister-literati promised the audience that no artful deception,
but only amateur or natural-born talent, was involved in Gough’s drama. In other words, his
performance was not unlike the parlor theatricals, charades, and tableaux vivants popular in the
mid-to-late Victorian era. These were played by children and attended by trusted family
349
George W. Bungay, Crayon Sketches and Off-Hand Takings (Boston, 1852), 95;
Massachusetts Cataract and Worcester County Waterfall (Worcester, MA), “Upper Town Hall,
July 29, 1844,” in News Clippings Folio Vol. 1, Gough Papers.
350
Paul Gilmore, “Romantic Electricity, or the Materiality of Aesthetics,” American Literature
76:2 (Sept. 2004), 473; Anon., “John B. Gough: The Master of Dramatic Eloquence,” Andover
Review 5:29 (May 1886), 533.
351
Weekly Record (London, England), Aug. 29, 1857.
140
members and friends only, and were off limits to the confidence men. 352 In this sense, Gough’s
drama was a parlor theatrical writ large. By focusing on domestic relations, he made temperance
“so much a family and fireside question” (a domestic drama), creating a safe “familial”
environment for the audience to share their “confidence” with the performer and other strangers
and to participate freely, at least for a moment, in the cult of sincerity. It is no wonder that some
like Rev. Talmage credited Gough for inspiring “confidence” among the people - not only a
“new confidence” in the work of “contemporary Christian labourers” but also the “confidence of
man in man.” 353
Platform and Pulpit
The ministers’ reviews of Gough as sort of a model preacher were very much an extension and
addition to their commentaries on homiletics. In endorsing Gough’s dramatic style, the
evangelical ministers were embracing a populist spirit in preaching. While some like George
Gilfillan warned the writer against entering into public lecturing at the risk of “vulgarizing
himself,” the evangelical ministers embraced the platform as a larger pulpit. Henry Ward
Beecher, for one, believed that the platform and the public hall freed the pastor from the
institutional and architectural constraints of the pulpit and the church and brought him into direct
contact with the man in the street. He disliked the boxed-up and tucked-away design of the pulpit
and promoted a layout that placed the pulpit amidst the pews and accentuated the physical
proximity of the preacher and the worshipers (“so close that you could lay your hand on them all
around”). 354
352
For parlor theatricals and the middle-class cult of sincerity, see Karen Halttunen, Confidence
Men and Painted Women (New Haven, 1982), Ch. 6.
353
Talmage, T. De Witt Talmage, 164-5.
354
John Hall, T. L. Cuyler, and H. W. Beecher, Successful Preaching (New York, n.d.), 61.
141
The ministers’ anti-intellectual remarks, their celebration of Gough’s original genius
untarnished by academic training, reflected their dissatisfaction with the increasingly
standardized education of ministerial candidates in theological seminaries.355 Beecher criticized
the seminaries for teaching too much theology and “not enough about men.” He feared that the
seminary-trained ministers were more interested in “theology in its various branches” than they
were “in sympathy with men.” He believed that the primary task of the pastor was to “catch
men” rather than to expound theology through their sermons, and that a good preacher should be
able to turn scholastic theology into “operative theology.” The minister must “know his people,
and preach to suit their wants.” 356 For Beecher, the qualms about losing “dignity” in coming
down from the intellectual pedestal were nothing but the “pretense of pride and of an artificial
culture.” Beecher worried more about insincerity (i.e., assuming the pretense of inspiration of a
high order) than the lack of sophistication in the preacher. For him, “[t]here is nothing so
dignified as a man in earnest.” 357
Lyman Abbott, who preferred Gough’s “broad sympathy with men” and his “English
common sense” to “philosophic culture,” emphasized the experiential basis and the moral
applications of religion. He warned against using sermons to advance the congregation’s
intellectual understanding. Few came to the church, he believed, to be instructed on the
355
Whereas it used to be a common practice that young aspirants for the ministry apprenticed
with older ministers in preparation for their own pastoral appointments, theological seminaries
increasingly took over the education of new ministers in the mid to late 19th century.
356
Ibid., 53, 55, 61.
357
Henry Ward Beecher, Yale Lectures on Preaching (New York, 1872), 170.
142
philosophy of religion; rather, they came to seek moral and spiritual guidance for their lives. 358
The preacher’s primary object was to make religion relevant and to effect immediate changes in
people’s lives, rather than to elucidate theological arguments. 359
Theodore L. Cuyler cited Gough, along with H. W. Beecher and Dr. Thomas Guthrie, in
his homiletic lecture as an example of the “heart power” that was essential to successful
preaching. He advised young ministers to use pathos and tears (unrestrained but genuine
emotions), rather than arguments, to “break down” the audience. Though Cuyler was not against
doctrinal preaching, he suggested nonetheless that one “preach to the plainest part of your
audience” by mixing “lively and picturesque illustrations” and making the sermon “pictorial to
the mind’s eye and to the memory” and the diction “shorter and sharper,” avoiding
“words…puzzling to the common people.” 360
The new emphasis on populist homiletics that qualified Gough as a preacher par
excellence cannot be isolated from the recent changes made by the same ministers in
hermeneutics, which foregrounds the experiential and emotive elements of the Bible. For Lyman
Abbott, the Bible in the preacher’s hand was no longer a “theological book.” It was not made for
sectarian doctrinal hairsplitting; nor should it be used to teach science or philosophy. Instead, it
358
Theodore L. Cuyler would have agreed with him: “The profoundest men do not come to
church to have their brains taxed, but to have their hearts made holier and their lives made
better.” Hall, Cuyler, and Beecher, Successful Preaching, 40.
359
Lyman Abbott, “Introduction” in Gough, Platform Echoes (Hartford, CT, 1884), 29-72, and
“The Preacher: His Object, His Instruments, and the Secret of His Power,” Outlook 63:15 (Dec.
9, 1899), 880-882.
360
Hall, Cuyler, and Beecher, Successful Preaching, 37-39, 44-45.
143
was a book of religious experiences - “the experiences of God in the souls of men...recorded in
every variety and type of literature,” including “drama” and “ecclesiastical ceremonialism.” 361
Charles J. Little, professor of logic and history at Syracuse University, explained biblical
miracles (such as the bush that burns but is not consumed [Exodus 3:3]) as highly subjective and
personal experiences, the vision of the devout Moses, rather than scientific and literal truths.
Indeed, in addressing such miracles, he was not concerned with “proving that the vision was real
and true,” but he taught instead the importance of recognizing the signs of God’s ever presence
in people’s lives and of actively seeking “personal intimacy” with God. 362 He was theologically
liberal and was said to be opposed to the “Back to Christ” movement. This was a movement
among some evangelicals that emphasized the historical continuity and the literal study of
biblical doctrines and traditions. 363 His sermons reveal that he was a proponent of the gradual or
progressive revelation of natural and biblical truths and the idea that “the truth is always there for
the patient discoverer.” For him, “your incredulity is only the confession of your limitations.” 364
Under the influence of Horace Bushnell, who divided the language of the Bible into the
poetic and the logical, Edwards A. Park, professor at the Andover Theological Seminary,
invented the distinction between the theology of the feelings and that of the intellect in his study
361
Abbott, “The Preacher,” 883.
362
Charles J. Little, Angel in the Flame (Cincinnati and New York, 1904), 16, 20, 21, and esp. 23:
“Think you, my brothers and my sisters, think you that God is the God of the ancients only, that
He has vanished from this later world? No! as the Lord Jehovah liveth, No! He is not the God of
the dead, even though their names be Moses and Isaiah and Paul. Or think you that He has no
vision or no task for you because your path is not the path of the mighty? Know you not that with
God there is no great and no small… God is never far from any one of us.”
363
Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven, CT, 1972),
782.
364
Charles M. Stuart, ed., In Memoriam: Charles Joseph Little, 28, 56.
144
of the Bible. 365 Though intended to be balanced against the extremes of pietism and rationalism,
Park’s treatise raised a bitter theological controversy when it was published in 1850. The bone of
contention, as Park’s chief opponent Rev. Charles Hodge at Princeton pointed out, was the
question of “the true relation between feeling and knowledge in matters of religion.” 366 Park
argued that there were poetic (figurative) passages apart form the logical (literal) ones in the
Bible. The former should not be read literally as doctrinal bases like the latter, but should be
understood and valued as appeals to the human imagination and emotions. To the discomfort of
the ultra-orthodox theologians such as Charles Hodge, Park gave religious feelings an equal
footing as he did religious doctrines and suggested that both (sometimes combined) offered
access to religious truth. He even hinted at the superiority of the theology of the feelings (though
less accurate in diction) in creating better impressions and pointing the common worshipper to
the right path. 367 In essence, Rev. Park provided a biblical foundation for emotive preaching, as
well as a way to resolve the difficulties and contradictions, within the Bible and between science
and religion, resulting from a literal interpretation of the Bible. 368 He was developing something
of a populist theology – a theology or hermeneutics geared toward homiletics. It was an effort to
365
Horace Bushnell, God in Christ (Hartford, CT, 1849); Sydney Ahlstrom, A Religious History
of the American People, 609-613; Edwards Amasa Park, “The Theology of the Intellect and That
of the Feelings,” Bibliotheca Sacra 7:27 (July 1850), 533-568.
366
Charles Hodge, “Review of ‘The Theology of the Intellect and That of the Feelings’,”
Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review (Oct. 1850), 670.
367
Park used a metaphor to suggest that a mother with “a woman’s tact” may have better success
in teaching a child than the “punctilious divine.” Park, “The Theology of the Intellect,” 533-4.
368
On the contrary, Charles Hodge believed that it was impossible to separate the so-called
theologies of the feelings and the intellect, and that intellectual understanding must precede the
change of heart and determine the nature of the affections. He criticized Park for accommodating
not science but “theories of science” and not philosophy but “speculations of philosophers.”
Hodge, “Review,” 665, 670, 672. For a more detailed discussion of the theological debate, see
Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (1977; New York, 1998), 147-151.
145
make the Bible less of an ancient text to be mined for sectarian tenets or explanations of natural
phenomena and more of a book highly relevant and emotively resonant with the common people.
Church and Stage
The same ministers, whose liberal hermeneutics and populist homiletics characterized religious
liberalism of the mid-to-late 19th century, were instrumental in creating the cult of Gough. For
them, Gough represented the new dramatic talent that could counter the influence of other urban
attractions, and his non-partisan, non-doctrinal, and yet religiously informed speech
circumvented controversial social and theological issues and had a close affinity to the “broader
religion” that they preached. On closer examination, their reviews were obviously one-sided, and
were even sometimes self-contradictory. On the one hand, they tried hard to convince the readers
that Gough was so absorbed in illustrating his theme that he cared nothing for effect 369 – the
essence of the anti-theatrical drama. But on the other, he was portrayed to be a spontaneous and
interactive lecturer who was highly responsive to his audience and who would adapt and
improvise for immediate effect. 370 The attributes and contributions that the ministers ascribed to
Gough represented what they wanted to see in him, or in a popular preacher like him, perhaps
more than whom he really was.
The paradox of the anti-theatrical drama spoke volumes of the dilemma that the
theologically liberal and socially conservative ministers faced in the second half of the 19th
century. As Calvinism decayed over the course of the century, the ministers were trying to hold
369
Elgin and Morayshire Courier (Elgin, Scotland), Oct. 9, 1857: “scarcely stopping at a cheer,
never inviting one.”
370
Anon., “John B. Gough: The Master of Dramatic Eloquence,” Andover Review 5:29 (May
1886), 533: “His self-criticism in style had relation to its fitness for an audience. If word, phrase,
argument, anecdote, illustration did not ‘fit the audience’ he dropped it; and he discovered its
fitness or unfitness by actual experiment upon an audience.”
146
on to Puritan moral values/traditions without the support of Puritan theology. From popular
preachers like Henry Ward Beecher to learned theologians like Edwards Amasa Park, these were
of a generation who had wrestled with and finally rejected the Calvinist tenets of original sin and
predestination. 371 They were staking the legitimacy of their moral government (Sabbatarian, antitheatrical, anti-pleasure) on human agency, instead of divine sovereignty, and they had to depend
on and believe in the sincerity of the individuals. This may have contributed to an acute sense of
moral anxiety, as laid bare by their obsessive defense of the conformity of Gough’s inner
character and outward style.
Anti-theatrical drama was arguably an innovation on the part of the college-educated and
theologically-liberal clergy to adopt Realist drama for the evangelical work of mass conversion.
The counter-attraction of Gough’s newfangled public lecture concurred with the emergence of P.
T. Barnum and Moses Kimball’s legitimate theater or “museum” catering to respectable middleclass families, which got rid of the third tier (where prostitutes used to ply their trade) and
alcohol, employed reputable “stars,” and staged moral or domestic drama. Though growing out
of antagonistic traditions (the evangelical moral reform versus the entertainment showbiz),
Gough’s temperance lecture and the legitimate theater had nonetheless converged on a number
of occasions. 372 On May 3, 1854, for example, his dramatic lecture was enthusiastically received
371
For the intellectual struggle, see especially Park, “The Theology of the Intellect,” 567-8. Rev.
Park believed that sin consisted only in the act of sinning and was not a passive (inherited) nature;
Also, Karen Halttunen, “Gothic imagination and social reform: the haunted houses of Lyman
Beecher, Henry Ward Beecher, and Harriet Beecher Stowe,” in Eric J. Sundquist, ed., New
Essays on Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Cambridge, UK and New York, 1986). Halttunen argued that the
Beechers’ fascination with Gothic horror was a displacement of their anguish over the rejection
of the Calvinism of their father’s generation.
372
Theater historians have been debating the true nature of the 19th century moral play, whether
it was, according to some, such as Jeffrey D. Mason and John W. Frick, a “veritable pulpit,” or
as Jeffrey Richards argues, just another “highly entertaining, feverish, conventional dramatic
exhibition.” Mason emphasizes the moral design of the play (“the primary purpose is to
147
by the audience at the Sadler’s Wells Theater in London, which establishment featured moral
plays (among them, his friend George Cruikshank’s three-act temperance drama, The Bottle). 373
Even Gough’s platform began to take after the stage, adopting the proscenium arch and an idyllic
tableau setting with a vanishing point. (See fig. 2 and 3.)
Fig. 2. Temperance Pavilion at Dunse
Source: Illustrated London News, Jan. 13, 1855
galvanize the audience into accepting the message and acting upon it”), whereas Richards
stresses the aesthetic conformity of moral plays with the mainstream melodrama (especially the
fact that theatrical managers often toned down or altered the moral message of a play to make it
non-obtrusive for the majority of the audience). Like Richards, I see moral theater as deriving
from a tradition (of commercial entertainment) different from that of the low-church theatrics of
evangelism. But in the final analysis, the seeming contradiction in interpretation merely reflects
our own ambivalence toward mass media, mirroring the debate surrounding Gough’s popularity
in the 19th century (some believing him to be another George Whitefield, and others seeing
nothing but a David Garrick). See John W. Frick, Theatre, Culture and Temperance Reform in
Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge, UK, 2003), 123; Jeffrey D. Mason, “The Drunkard
(1844) and the Temperance Movement,” in Melodrama and the Myth of America (Bloomington,
1993), 61-87; Jeffrey Richards, ed., Early American Drama (New York, 1997), 245.
373
Frick, Theatre, Culture and Temperance Reform, 94.
148
Fig. 3 Gough at Sadler’s Wells, Sketch by George Cruikshank,
Source: Illustrated London News, May 20, 1854
Paradoxically, the innovation approved by the ministers and supposed to empty the
theater and fill the church also became something of a segue to the reconciliation and
convergence of church and stage in the second half of the 19th century. 374 Gough, the master of
anti-theatrical drama, provided the transition, during and even beyond his lifetime, from the antitheatrical Puritan tradition to the gradual and perhaps ambivalent acceptance of moral and
commercial theater. Gough did this by legitimizing dramatic representation on the platform or
374
Even the interior design of churches began to take after that of the theater, evidenced by the
widespread adoption of the amphitheater-style auditoriums since the 1860s. See Jeanne Halgren
Kilde, When Church Became Theater: The Transformation of Evangelical Architecture and
Worship in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford, 2002), Ch. 5.
149
delivering temperance lectures in theaters, and allegedly by attending and promoting the famous
moral temperance play, T. S. Arthur’s Ten Nights in a Bar Room. 375
375
The story of Gough’s attendance at a Ten Nights production in Cincinnati and his promotion
of the play comes from Honoré W. Morrow, Tiger! Tiger! The Life Story of John B. Gough (New
York, 1930), 197-201; Amy Hughes suggests that Gough may have gone to see The Drunkard on
Mar. 16, 1844. Amy E. Hughes, “John B. Gough’s Afternoon at the Theater; or, the Tyranny of
an Account,” in Stephen Johnson, ed., A Tyranny of Documents: The Performing Arts Historian
as Film Noir Detective (n.p., 2011). Neither story, however, can be independently verified.
150
CHAPTER FOUR
The Cult of John B. Gough:
From Temperance to Moral Entertainment
On Nov. 21, 1860, shortly after his return from his three year sojourn in Britain, John B. Gough,
the celebrated temperance advocate, was announced to speak in New Haven on a new subject,
“Street Life in London.” The lecture was the first of a series that Gough prepared based on his
experiences in London. It was the first time that he deviated from the temperance theme, and for
the very first time, he was to have a manuscript and was to read from it. 376
Gough explained the sudden change of tack as a result of popular demand combined with
personal need: that his friends desired to hear about his travel experiences; and that he also “felt
the necessity of change,” after speaking on the same subject for so long, in order to “prevent my
losing the elasticity of mind.” 377 But the real reasons were perhaps more complicated. He may
have won his high-profile libel trial in London, but to the observers on both sides of the Atlantic
(except for his partisans), he was not entirely free of blame in the whole affair, which exposed
and deepened the rift in the temperance movement. Thanks to the factional rivalry of the
prohibition and moral suasion parties, in which Gough played a conspicuous part, the
atmosphere for temperance work had become too divisive and poisonous by 1860. In other
words, it was difficult to stake a public position without offending either party. Added to the
factional tension in the temperance ranks, public enthusiasm for temperance work was petering
out in face of the imminent political crisis of secession (Lincoln was elected president in
November 1860). An astute observer of public moods, Gough was not to speak on unpopular
376
John B. Gough, Autobiography and Personal Recollections Autobiography and Personal
Recollections of John B. Gough (Springfield, MA; Chicago; Philadelphia, 1869), 525-526.
377
Ibid., 525-526.
151
issues. His London lectures were supposed to take people’s minds off controversial issues and to
be, above all, funny and entertaining. In fact, Gough reportedly refused to give these lectures in
churches, as “the humorous character of these particular lectures is such as to make a church
inappropriate for their delivery.” 378
The London lecture series marked a significant transition in Gough’s career. Admittedly,
he did not ditch temperance and would continue to return to the topic; but he proved himself
capable of being received by the public on other subjects, and on less dogmatic grounds, as a
moral entertainer. Also, he used to rely on the temperance circuits, made up of local temperance
societies, national societies, and church societies, but now he became more and more associated
with the commercial lyceum bureaus (James Redpath’s, James Burton Pond’s) and was
repeatedly called for by “literary associations.” Gough would not be confined to the role of a
temperance reformer or a reformed drunkard any longer; he was on his way of becoming an
entertainer and a celebrity for a broader moral and respectable public, teetotal or not.
This chapter traces how Gough remade his public image after 1860, and equally
importantly, what was done for him by others writing about him during and beyond his lifetime.
Gough’s death in 1886 did not end his spell over the public. He was commemorated in
biographies and elocutionary anthologies and by numerous emulators who aped his dramatic
style and recited his lectures. It was the collapse of the Victorian culture (and Prohibition) in the
1920s and 30s that did him in. Before he disappeared completely from public memory, he made
his last appearance in popular historical fiction (where he was made a fan of the temperance play
Ten Nights in a Bar Room) and memorabilia in 1930. This last public appearance did not restore
378
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (New York), Feb. 26, 1861. “In his new lectures on
London, John B. Gough, unlike Wendell Holmes, has ‘dared to be as funny as he can’…Mr.
Gough declines to deliver his ‘London’ lectures in churches, upon the ground that the humorous
character of these particular lectures is such as to make a church inappropriate for their delivery.”
152
his place in the American pantheon of cultural heroes; but in different (and perhaps unintentional)
ways, it consigned him to the circus of curiosities (which is how we tend to see him today),
sending him further on his way to oblivion.
New Lectures
Upon the popular reception of his “Street Life in London,” Gough followed it up with more
lectures on his London travels (“Lights and Shadows of London Life,” “London by Night,” “The
Great Metropolis,” etc.), imparting “knowledge” ranging from the famous London fog to how
London bartenders recycled spilled alcohol using perforated pewter counter tops to make a
“cocktail.” London was for him “an almost inexhaustible field” and his London lectures were
“continually called for.” Apart from the standard temperance-themed lectures, which he
continued to give on demand, he also began to write new pieces more or less for general
amusement under such titles as “Peculiar People,” “Eloquence and Orator,” and “Blunders,”
which consisted of humorous incidents he had encountered and anecdotes about celebrities with
whom he had rubbed shoulders. 379
Some had reservations about Gough’s innovation. “He rose so high and penetrated to
such a depth when speaking upon temperance,” the Christian Advocate observed, “that to see
him in the act of simply entertaining an audience produced a kind of shock.” 380 To those who
suspected him of abandoning the temperance cause, Gough responded that he was merely using
general topics to draw in people who would have eschewed a temperance lecture and he had used
every opportunity to drive home his temperance message. However, it is clear from the private
accounts of attending Gough’s lectures after 1860 that the impressions the new lectures created
379
Gough, Autobiography and Personal Recollections, 527-28.
380
“John B. Gough,” Christian Advocate (New York), Feb. 25, 1886.
153
had no bearing on the audience’s view on temperance; they were more often “festive occasions,”
social gatherings for Christian young men to meet their dates, and a substitute for the more
somber prayer-meeting on a Sunday evening. 381 Though Gough’s lecturing style or effect had
changed very little, the content of his lectures were both broadened in range and diluted in terms
of moral agenda. The new lectures were indicative of the transformations that Gough underwent
after 1860. He was no longer content with being identified as a temperance reformer or
remembered as a reformed drunkard. He wanted to become a cultural celebrity.
Autobiographical Self-Making
The revamping of Gough’s autobiography in 1869 (originally published in 1845) was part of his
post-Civil-War remaking of his public image. The 1869 autobiography was different from the
1845 version in many ways. First, the two versions of autobiographies bear little physical
resemblance. The publication of the original autobiography was undertaken at Gough’s own risk.
It was printed for and hawked by the lecturer (allegedly from “a carpet bushel bag”) as he
travelled from town to town (later, also for sale at bookstores and other retail establishments). 382
The book itself is a modest and slim volume (duodecimo, 172 pages), bound in plain cloth, with
381
The conclusion is based on private letters and diaries of middle/upper-middle-class women,
such as Emeline E. Joslin Colony to Harriet Hall Johnson Johnson, Mar. 22, 1863, Allen-Johnson
Family Papers, 1759-1992 (Alexandria, VA, 2010), 1-4; Elizabeth Payson Prentiss, The Life and
Letters of Elizabeth Payson Prentiss (New York, 1882), journal entry on February 14, 1856;
Annie L. Youmans Van Ness, Diary of Annie L. Van Ness, 1864-1881 (Alexandria, VA, 2004),
journal entry on Sunday, April 27, 1873.
382
That Gough hawked his autobiographies during his lectures was satirized in Boston Herald,
Dec. 2, 1847. “He (Gough) produced a carpet bushel bag, of about the capacity of the pickpocket
Bell’s pocket, containing copies of the same (autobiography).” The autobiography was for sale at
the Saxton & Miles bookstore in New York City, which he visited before being “drugged” in
1845. L.S. Beck & Son, a home furnishing store in Washington D.C., doubled as bookseller for
Gough.
154
no illustrations. 383 It was priced to be sold quickly and cheaply at 37 ½ cents, and to be read by
all those who heard, or heard of, the lecturer. For many, this was not only a printed extension of
Gough’s autobiographical lecture, but it was considered, especially where he was less widely
known, a public testament to the lecturer’s character and “professional” credentials. 384
The republication of the autobiography in 1869 was an entirely different affair. The new
book was sold by subscription through a Springfield (MA) publisher, Bill, Nichols & Co. 385
Even before the manuscript was finished, local agents (who took out a percentage on the sales)
began canvassing each city, town, and village for subscribers. 386 Newspapers followed the
writing and printing of the book with anticipation and put out excerpts (teasers) from the
“advance sheets” they received. 387 The new book was said to be “gotten up and illustrated with
a view to the wants of the subscription trade.” 388 It promised to be a substantial volume (552page octavo), “beautifully bound and illustrated” (by George Cruikshank, the well-known
383
A portrait of the author was added in 1847 as a frontispiece with a picture guard, and the
statements about the New York scandal were appended to the American editions published after
1846 and were subsequently removed by 1853.
384
Ronald J. Zboray and Mary S. Zboray, “Reading and Everyday Life in Antebellum Boston:
The Diary of Daniel F. and Mary D. Child,” Libraries & Culture 32:3 (Summer 1997), 285-323.
The Childs’ diary entries in April 1845 shows that they were reading Gough’s autobiography,
most likely, after attending his lectures; Donald M. Scott suggests the public lecturer’s
dependence on the print media to shore up his professionalism. Scott, “Print and the Public
Lecture System, 1840-60,” in William L. Joyce, et al., ed. Printing and Society in Early America
(Worcester, MA, 1983).
385
And it was simultaneously issued by F. Dewey in San Francisco; Sampson Low, Son, &
Marston in London, England; and A. H. Hovey in Toronto, Canada.
386
Ads that solicit agents for the book can be found everywhere from the Hartford Daily
Courant, Oct. 4, 1869 to Daily Evening Bulletin (San Francisco), Oct. 2, 1869.
387
See for example Congregationalist and Boston Recorder (Boston), Sept. 30, 1869; Dec. 12,
1869.
388
Daily Evening Bulletin (San Francisco), Oct. 2, 1869.
155
illustrator for Charles Dickens’s novels, and others). It featured “a finely executed portrait of the
author on steel” and a list of “engravings on wood.” 389 This enlarged and updated volume was
sold for $3.75, which put it well out of the reach of not only the workingmen but also the clerks
and the lower middle class. Unlike the first autobiography, which Gough claimed to be “a short
and simple annal [sic] of the poor,” the new book (and the very fact of its being pre-sold) was a
testament of his established fame and respectability. 390 It was not only intended to be read, but to
be seen, designed to be displayed in the prosperous middle-class parlor or library; it was a
showpiece that demonstrated the virtuous taste and the wealth of the owner. 391
Popular as Gough’s first autobiography was, it had a troubled past as Gough did. The first
autobiography was often associated with a certain John D. Ross (whose real name was
discovered to be John Dix), an English writer (from Bristol) of minor fame. Dix was said to be a
reformed drunkard, converted by Gough. Upon getting acquainted with Gough in early 1845,
Ross, or rather John Dix, quickly entered the lecturer’s inner circle and helped advance his career
as sort of a press agent. 392 He penned sketches for Gough’s lectures in newspapers and put
together eulogistic songs and poems by evangelical notables in an appendix amounting to some
48 pages in a 172-page book.. Some believed that it was Dix who wrote Gough’s autobiography
389
Hartford Daily Courant, Sept. 23, 1869.
390
John B. Gough, Autobiography (Boston, 1845), 1.
391
The aesthetic and monetary values of the physical appearances of books are discussed in
Ronald J. Zboray, “Antebellum Reading and Ironies of Technological Innovation,” American
Quarterly 40:1 (Mar., 1988), 65-82.
392
And he did more than that, too. When Gough was accused of stopping at a local tavern in
Newburyport, MA in 1845, Dix went to confront the owner and exacted a public apology (with
cash reimbursement) on the threat of a libel suit. Dix had tried to start a temperance magazine
with Gough, and he was delegated by Gough to look up the latter’s father and others mentioned
in the autobiography (in order to corroborate Gough’s story).
156
in the first place. As late as in 1869, when Gough’s new autobiography was in the press and Dix
was dead, some still insisted publicly that Dix, rather than Gough, was the real author of the first
autobiography. 393
The new autobiography gave Gough a chance to reassert his authorship. He was
definitely eager to rid himself of the ghost of John Dix, all the more in 1869, because Dix had
already become a reviled name in both the literary and the temperance circles by the late 1850s.
Not only did Dix relapse into bouts of drunkenness, his credibility as an author was questioned.
Dix had won some fame in Boston for his lively sketches of literary and clerical figures, and
particularly for a biography of Thomas Chatterton, a child prodigy and author of apocryphal
medieval poems. 394 In late 1857, it was revealed by the London Athenaeum that Dix, the
biographer of Chatterton the famous literary forger had himself forged documents as well as the
portrait of the young poet. 395 Almost at the same time, Dix began to publish stories satirizing
pledge-signers and teetotalers in the popular magazine Ballou’s Pictorial. 396
Dix’s disrepute threatened to put Gough’s own veracity to doubt – if not his judiciousness
in having accepted Dix’s literary collaboration in the first place. He took care to erase all traces
of Dix from the new autobiography. Not only was the appendix (compiled and edited by Dix)
393
George H. Monroe (pseud. “Templeton”), “Boston Correspondence,” Hartford Daily Courant,
Oct. 4, 1869.
394
Dix’s biography of Chatterton was first published in Bristol and London in 1837, and then
reprinted in Boston in 1845 and in London in 1851. Dix also published a few volumes on
American divines in 1853-4 in London through Wm. Tweedie, no doubt with Gough’s influence.
395
For the controversy over Chatterton, see W. Moy Thomas, “The Inquest on Chatterton,” The
Athenaeum (London, England), Dec. 5, 1857 and Jan. 23, 1858; and Walter Thornbury, “John
Dix, the Biographer of Chatterton,” Notes and Queries (London, England) 4th Series, IX (April
13, 1872), 294-296.
396
John Ross Dix, “Paul Poppleton’s Dream: A Tale of a Tea-Tippler,” Ballou’s Pictorial
Drawing-Room Companion (Boston), Dec. 19, 1857.
157
dropped, but Gough denied that Dix had taken any active part in the writing of the original
autobiography. It was he who “dictated” the autobiography to Dix, who was merely “a good
short-hand writer,” and the language of the autobiography was entirely his, “excepting only three,
or, at most, four instances.” With regard to his new work, Gough insisted that he had allowed no
one to touch it but himself: “I have written it, revised it, looked over the proof, and, such as it is,
it is mine.” 397 Rather than entrusting the new book to some literary friend, Gough felt confident
enough (now ensconced in his celebrity) in 1869 to assume sole authorship and to rely on his
own best judgment in making any omissions and additions to his life.
The new autobiography gave Gough a chance not only to tell new stories of his life (since
1845), but to reshape old ones as befitting his new social position. Gough took care to revise his
anti-clerical remarks regarding his mother’s burial in a pauper’s grave without Christian rites.
Compare the two passages below.
397
Gough, Autobiography and Personal Recollections (1869), 545.
158
So was she buried! Without a
shroud; her shoes on her feet. One of
God’s creatures – an affectionate wife,
a devoted mother, a faithful friend, and
a poor Christian; that’s all! So there
was no burial service read; into that
trench she was thrown without a
prayer; and that was the end, after a
long life of faithful work for others- a
life of patient struggle, fighting nobly,
lovingly, and hopefully the battle of
life. This was the end. No, no, thank
God! No, not the end. Her own body
rests in hope, and he who wept at the
grave of Lazarus, watches the sleeping
dust of his servant. Yes, life and
immortality are brought to light
through the gospel. My poor mother
sleeps as sweetly as if entombed in a
marble sarcophagus; and thank God,
she will rise as gloriously when “He
who became the first fruits of them
that slept,” shall call his humble
disciple to come and “be forever with
the Lord.” 399 (1869)
There was no burial-service read, none. My mother was one of God’s
creatures, but she had lived- died amongst
the poor. She had bequeathed no legacies
to charitable institutions, and how could
the church afford one of its self-denying
men to pray over her pauper-grave? She
had only been an affectionate wife, a
devoted mother, and a poor Christian; so
how could a bell toll with any propriety as
she drew near to her final resting-place?
No prim undertaker, who measured yards
of woe on his face according to the
number of hatbands and gloves ordered for
the funeral, was there, and what need, then,
of surpliced priest? Well, it was some
comfort to me, that my poor mother’s
body could ‘rest in hope,’ without the
hired services of either; and I could not
help feeling and rejoicing that he who
wept at the grave of Lazarus, was
watching the sleeping dust of his servant.
O! miserable indeed is the lot of the poor;a weary, struggling, self-denying life, and
then a solitary death and an unblessed
grave! 398 (1847)
399
398
Gough, Autobiography and Personal
Recollections (1869), 75-6.
Gough, Autobiography (1845), 25.
159
The original passage showed spite at the church and the “surpliced priest” for rendering religious
services based on monetary contributions. In the revised version, Gough replaced it with a more
uplifting paragraph emphasizing the hope of salvation for the righteous. 400 This no doubt
reflected his new standing with the mainline churches.
Another troubling passage for Gough in 1869 was his unequivocal expression of support
for legal prohibition in the 1845 autobiography. The original passage, which comes as something
of a reflection on his first relapse and recovery and serves as a conclusion to the original text,
made it his “imperative duty, to proceed yet another step” (beyond mere Washingtonian moral
suasion) to “throw another wall of protection” (that of legal prohibition) around the reformed
drunkard. 401 Needless to say, this position had become too forward for the taste of his British
patrons by the late 1850s, and he took care to remove the passage from the new book. 402
The deliberation that went into the changes Gough made to his autobiography is shown,
incidentally, in the preexisting British editions of the autobiography. The original text of the
autobiography had undergone several changes during its publications in Britain by 1869 – with
or without Gough’s consent. The entire concluding passage regarding Gough’s support for legal
prohibition was eliminated in the London editions (1846 and later) and was replaced by an
400
Frederic Richard Lees noticed a similar discrepancy between the burial paragraphs in the
original autobiography and the version that appeared in the Ipswich Series of Temperance Tracts
(ca. 1856). He argued that Gough made the adaptation “to suit the taste of readers who differ in
religious opinions.” It is not clear, however, whether Gough was responsible for making the
change in the Ipswich tract. It may very well have been the work of his British editors. See Lees,
Mr. Gough’s Account of His Relapse (Leeds, England, ca. 1859), 10-11.
401
Gough, Autobiography (1845), 120.
402
Gough may have tried to do this without detection. The concluding part of the original
autobiography, which contained the aforementioned passage, appears as an excerpt (Gough did
not mention any editing) in small print in the new autobiography to show that he had been
consistent in his position and that he “held the true ground,” when he had deleted a key sentence.
See Gough, Autobiography and Personal Recollections (1869), 192.
160
exhortation on the necessity of reliance on God in temperance work, in keeping with the new
title The Hand of Providence Exemplified in the History of John B. Gough. 403 Likewise, in the
Ipswich Series of Temperance Tracts (London and Ipswich, ca. 1856), in place of the passage
that mocks the “surpliced priest,” we find a new paragraph (different from the 1869 new edition)
praising Christian resignation to suffering in this life in hope of the next. 404 Circumstantial
evidence like this strongly suggests that Gough knew exactly which paragraphs of his original
autobiography that might offend his readers and that he made a point of repairing them in 1869.
Apart from dropping names of old friends and adding those of the new transatlantic
notables that he befriended, Gough also recast the characters in the autobiography in accordance
with his new status as a celebrity. There is a distinct shift of focus from the dead wife of his
workingman days to the living and devout middle-class lady that he married in his reformed life
in the revised autobiography. 405 The working-class wife, who dies with her new-born baby due
to the drunken husband’s neglect, was a key element in Gough’s early stories and in the popular
songs and verses about him. 406 In 1869, however, he took care to remove the pathetic scene of
his lying over the dead wife’s grave after a suicide attempt (“All night long have I lain on the
damp grass which covered my wife’s grave, steeped to the very lips in poverty, degradation, and
403
John B. Gough, Record of My Life, Or the Hand of Providence Exemplified in the History of J.
B. Gough (1846; rep., London, 1860).
404
The Ipswich Series of Temperance Tracts (2 vols., London and Ipswich, England, ca. 1856) 2:
No. 132, 43-4.
405
Mary Cheney, Gough’s first wife, was said to be the sister of a fisherman in Newbury, MA.
Mary E. Whitcomb, his second wife, was the daughter of a farmer in Berlin, MA. She worked as
a school teacher in Boylston, MA before marrying Gough.
406
See “Lines” (A long time ago) in appendix of Autobiography (1845) and Gough’s song, The
Inebriate’s Lament, as published in Covert and Dodge’s Collection of Songs, Duets, Glees,
Choruses, & c. (Boston, 1844).
161
misery”). 407 In the 1845 version, his second wife, Mary E. Whitcomb, whom he married in Nov.
1843, was barely mentioned. By 1869, she had become the center of Gough’s “life” (as
published) and was seen as such by the public. 408 (Gough was to dedicate the third volume of his
reminiscences, Sunlight and Shadow, published in 1880, to her.) Her enlarged presence in the
second autobiography, and her sensibility, which Gough took care to highlight, for example by
citing a letter from her describing the death-bed scene of her niece, were clearly indicative of the
transformation of Gough’s own status from workingman to middle class.409 Joel Stratton, a
waiter at a temperance hotel in Worcester, who had famously saved Gough from the gutter by a
brotherly tap on the shoulder in 1842, became in the new autobiography the receiver of Gough’s
philanthropy and a model of Christian self-effacing workman whom Gough liked to patronize. 410
Though the impoverished Stratton had been too modest to ask for any favor in his lifetime,
Gough announced, without the wonted humility, in his new work that “it has been a source of
407
Gough, Autobiography (1845), 57.
408
Contrast Autobiography (1845), 89 and Autobiography and Personal Recollections (1869),
210: “I can truly say that I owe much, very much, of what good I have been able to accomplish,
to my true, faithful, loving wife”; Peterhead (Scotland) Sentinel, Oct. 9, 1857: “Mrs. Gough has
been the making of her husband. Oftimes when he is swaying the sympathies of a crowded
assemblage, is she upon her knees, praying that grace and direction may be given him and who
knows but in this very fact lies the secret of Gough’s success?”
409
The letter was noted as a special feature of the second autobiography. See anon., “John B.
Gough’s Experiences,” Literary World (London, England), Dec. 24, 1880, 436-7: “In it, amongst
other things, there was a letter from Mrs. Gough, describing the death of a beloved niece, most
touching and most beautiful.”
410
Joel Stratton famously gave Gough a “gentle tap on the shoulder,” and invited him to attend
the local Washingtonian meeting. Gough, Autobiography and Personal Recollections (1869),
524: “Joel Stratton never once asked of me a favor. He never obtruded himself upon me; never
alluded to his instrumentality in my reform; never appeared to pride himself upon it, as if it were
a meritorious deed.”
162
great gratification and thankfulness that I have been able to appropriate three hundred dollars per
year to his widow.” 411
The new autobiography was, above all, a place where Gough could publish, unchallenged,
his own renditions of the major controversies surrounding his life. It is where he mounted his
own defense against the public attacks on his integrity. After his scandal in New York in
September 1845, a supplement was added to the original autobiography containing Gough’s
official statement about the incident and a letter of endorsement from his church. The
supplement was subsequently removed from the American editions in 1853, when Gough was
scheduled to visit Britain for the first time. It never appeared in the British editions. It looked like
that he was going to bury the scandal for good, but as a result of the unexpected rivalry with
Frederic Richard Lees and as the fallout of their quarrels, public interest was revived in the
lecturer’s checkered past. 412 In 1869, Gough felt the need to reintroduce the New York scandal
in the new autobiography, and he told his side of the story by setting up the “correct” context
(proper sequence of events and sentiments) for the reader.
In his wonted modesty, the lecturer expressed his reluctance to review the “unfortunate
calamity,” which after more than two decades still made him “involuntarily draw back with a
shudder.” He chose not to start with the main incident, but recounted the threats, calumnies, and
traps that he encountered, more than his fair share (he implies), before the New York incident. 413
411
Gough, Autobiography and Personal Recollections (1869), 525.
412
Lees publicized Gough’s scandal in Britain after the libel trial and reprinted William J.
Snelling’s anti-Gough pamphlet Goffiana.
413
See Gough, Autobiography and Personal Recollections (1870), 196: “Traps were laid for me.
I narrowly escaped being drawn into an improper place, by a letter purporting to come from a
heart-broken mother, requesting me to call and see her son.” This may have given Honoré
Morrow the inspiration for her story about Gough’s narrow escape in London. See later in the
chapter on Morrow’s historical fiction on John B. Gough.
163
In this context, it appears to be only a matter of time before he would fall victim to one of the
liquor dealers’ darkest schemes. Gough insisted on his innocence and attributed his fall to no
moral obliquity on his part but to his naïveté. He wrote that he “had no conception men could
prove so devilish in their malice.” He closed the chapter in his life with a paean to his wife, who
did not even make it into his official statement in 1845 but now loomed large, for her “unfailing
devotion” and unwavering trust in him, which obviously was intended to boost public confidence
in him. 414
The temperance libel trial in London, which led directly to the renewed public attention
to his New York scandal, was featured prominently in the new autobiography (taking up three
chapters). Since the papers on both sides of the Atlantic had been plastered with news about the
trial in 1858, Gough chose to revisit the case to justify his course of action. He disclaimed having
taken any part in factional intrigues and made himself to be the aggrieved party (“a poor
Yankee”) who suffered persecution in a foreign land at the hand of a powerful organization (the
United Kingdom Alliance) and its henchmen. He made this claim despite his being backed by
two equally powerful and deep-pocketed organizations. He went to court solely on the advice of
his friends, and it was his enemies who forced his hand by their incessant attacks. He reprinted
the trial records and a long defense of his role in the controversy published in Manchester Times.
In his version of the story, he downplayed the ideological differences between prohibition and
moral suasion. Whereas he made sure to avoid mentioning prohibition during his British tour,
now he again became a strong supporter of prohibition “from the beginning.” He turned the court
battle, the outgrowth of an ideological and factional conflict, into a personal victory. 415
414
Gough, Autobiography and Personal Recollections (1869), 208-9.
415
Ibid., 392, 402, and Chs. XXVII to XXIX.
164
Another important charge that Gough chose to respond to in the new autobiography was
all the bad press about the high fees he received for his lectures and his accumulation of wealth.
He did not seem to care to refute the charge of his making money any more. The list of his
average earnings per lecture over the years, which he choose to publish in 1869, proved the point
beyond any doubt. Citing God as his (only) witness, Gough claimed the right of privacy over
where his money went. Instead, he was trying to justify his earnings on its own terms - that he
had to pay his own expenses as well as for his assistants and that the high fees he commanded
reflected public demand and his fair market value. “If the associations that employ me are
satisfied, I know not why I should not be, - and outsiders have no reason to grumble.”
For him, the traditional fundraising methods for supporting the advocates of a benevolent
cause, i.e. by taking posthumous donations and by selling subscription papers, were far from
adequate. His worldly prosperity was not a blemish, as some thought, but an “honor” to the
temperance cause, showing that the cause could sustain its own advocates and their families. 416
Moral enterprise, in his line of thought, should be as profitable and market oriented as any other
respectable business ventures (see chart 1). The sustainability of a moral cause in a market
society, therefore, depends not merely on the moral or religious impulse, but on how it is
marketed. This was the real driving force, apart from the immediate causes of the factional and
political crises, behind Gough’s remaking of his public image and his reshaping of moral crusade
as moral entertainment.
416
Ibid., 247-250. See Christian Advocate (New York), Feb. 25, 1886, for the opposite view:
“He rose so high and penetrated to such a depth when speaking upon temperance that to see him
in the act of simply entertaining an audience produced a kind of shock… The modification of his
career as he grew older brought with it certain advantages and disadvantages. He gained large
sums by his lectures, and lived in an elaborate and very generous way, which once begun,
compelled him to make a large income to sustain it.”
165
Chart 1. Gough’s Average Earnings
Source: Gough, Autobiography and Personal Recollections (1869)
Though hardly seen as “literature” by the cultural elite and jeered for its inordinate
influence over women, Gough’s second autobiography was significant for himself and for the
well-to-do evangelical middle class. 417 The new autobiography was no longer a drunkard’s
narrative, or a beggar’s story. Rather, it was an inspirational self-made man story to “help and
stimulate in the battle of life, encourage the despondent, and aid the struggling in their efforts to
rise above adverse circumstances.” 418 From “a short and simple annal [sic] of the poor,” the
417
Saturday Review of Politics, Literature (London), Jun. 4, 1870 and Jan. 22, 1881; The
Athenaeum (London, England), Jun. 4, 1870; the Chicago Tribune printed a satirical (and no
doubt fictional) story of a book agent being brought by a husband to court and fined for
disturbing domestic peace by selling Gough’s autobiography, which possesses an almost
seductive influence on the women. See “Gough’s Autobiography – How it Destroyed the Peace
of a Chicago Family,” rep., in New Orleans Times, Jan. 23, 1870.
418
Historian Ann Fabian discussed the narratives of beggars, convicts, ex-slaves, and Civil War
POWs, etc. as essentially the same as those of the reformed drunkards, in their soliciting public
166
autobiography had grown into a stately (if a bit unwieldy) volume that adorned the private
libraries of many a “self-made” man and woman. Gough reasserted his authorship, reordered his
life, and turned his temperance crusade into a story of personal success. He even made stylistic
refinement by incorporating quotations from famous persons. 419 It is clear that by 1869, he had
aspired to be more than a reformed drunkard or a temperance crusader; he was to be seen as a
public celebrity and a cultural hero for the Victorian middle class. (Fig. 4)
Fig. 4. Frontispiece showing “temperance, industry,
education, and wealth”
Source: Gough, Autobiography and Personal
Recollections (1871)
support and alms through publishing; Gough, Autobiography and Personal Recollections (1870),
vii.
419
See “John B. Gough’s Experiences,” Literary World (London, England), Dec. 24, 1880: “If
we are to judge of him by the quotations with which the book abounds, we should say that he is
more of a student than we otherwise have supposed him to be.”
167
Biographical Remaking of Gough’s Life
Gough’s fame gave birth to a great number of biographical sketches and monographs, which
circulated alongside his autobiography and other publications. He appeared (often posthumously)
as a biographical subject in self-help literature, elocution handbooks, and temperance and
religious memoirs. These literary extensions of his autobiography extended Gough’s fame
beyond his life span and helped secure him a niche in the pantheon of Christian cultural heroes
revered by the Victorian middle class in the late 19th and early 20th century. They sometimes
doubled as didactic advice manuals designed for the urban young men, which related Gough’s
experiences, especially his early struggles, directly to those of the readers.
There were two book-length biographies of Gough in Britain during his lifetime,
published in 1854 and 1878 respectively on the occasions of two of his visits to the island. Both
circulated alongside Gough’s autobiography. Three American biographies of Gough came out
after his death (1892, 1893, and 1930); and the first two were simultaneously issued in Britain
and Canada. All but one of the biographies were written by clergymen. Mrs. Honoré Willsie
Morrow, wife of the New York publisher William Morrow, was the author of the 1930 historical
fiction, Tiger! Tiger!, based on Gough’s life. Hers, however, was quite different from the
didactic biographies of the 19th century and will be discussed separately in this chapter.
One might wonder why there was a demand for biographies of Gough when his
autobiography was readily available. A possible explanation is the price. Since 1869, Gough’s
subscription-only autobiography had been sold for $3.25 (1869) and $3.75 (1870), which barred
many who could spare only 25 or 50 cents to hear him or his latter-day imitators from buying the
book. To learn more about the life of the celebrity orator, they could turn to a biography (or even
168
a magazine), which promised a digest of the main facts (and often a cheaper portrait) at one third
of the cost (or less).
Admittedly, not all chose the biography over the autobiography for reasons of economic
necessity. In Britain, in particular, where cheaper reprints of Gough’s autobiography (due to the
lack of international copyright protection) were available through the 1880s, biographies of
Gough were still being popularly sold. 420 It would seem that the biographies promised more than
a condensed story. They functioned as sort of a guide mediating between the raw text of the
autobiography and the reader, i.e. the young man. Although the clerical biographers did not aim
to tell new stories, they did “group the ascertained facts in a new setting.” 421 The re-grouping of
facts and the new setting did not necessarily change the gist of Gough’s story, but were certainly
intended to provide a “cleaner” and a more relatable reading experience, in which moral lessons
were spelled out, pitfalls highlighted, and episodes subject to misunderstanding curtailed or
expunged. 422
Following the literary conventions of popular self-made man biographies, Gough’s
clerical biographers combed his life for examples of “moral inspiration” and “moral warning,”
and they searched his early life for budding traits, “inner characteristics,” or early signs of his
future greatness. 423 They praised poverty. Though only “less cruel than sin,” it “teaches self-
420
Rev. John Thomas’s biography of Gough, The Life and Times of John B. Gough (London,
1878) went through at least eight editions.
421
Rev. Wm. Carlos Martyn, Apostle of Cold Water (New York, London, and Toronto, 1893), xi.
422
Rev. Thomas, for example, made short shrift of Gough’s controversies in The Life and Times
of John B. Gough (1878). He deleted Gough’s statement on the New York scandal (keeping only
the church statement of endorsement) and barely mentioned the Gough-Lees rivalry.
423
For the biographical conventions, see Scott E. Casper, Constructing American Lives:
Biography and Culture in Nineteenth Century America (Chapel Hill, 1999), 88-106; Martyn,
169
reliance, promotes diligence, necessitates economy, stirs enterprise, and is intended to build
character.” Gough’s early deprivation not only “allied him with some of the greatest of men” but
made him compassionate and generous toward the poor with his later prosperity. 424 They found
schooling and education important, but celebrated “the world” as “the greatest of schools” –
“whose teacher is experience, whose text-books are hard knocks, and whose terms come
high.” 425 Temperance was definitely a key theme, but drinking wasn’t so much a sin as was the
“social glass.” The ministers believed that no youth of innocence would take to drinking unless it
was branded as “respectable.” It was the social circle that a young man chose to join, by taking
or refusing a social glass, that mattered. Drinking was but an act of initiation into the society of
urban vices, and ultimately, into a life of unbelief. 426 The ministers stressed the infinite
possibility of improvement, of changing one’s life and expanding on one’s slim capital through
work. 427 They did not celebrate money making per se, but treated it as the natural outcome of
Apostle of Cold Water, xi, 19-20; Rev. Edward Augustus Rand, A Knight That Smote the Dragon,
or the Young People’s Gough (London, 1892), 17, 20.
424
Martyn, Apostle of Cold Water, 33, 50.
425
Martyn, Apostle of Cold Water, 19, 325: “We are confident that an academic education would
have hurt more than it could have helped him… A fastidious culture would have refined away
much of Gough’s popular power. What he might have gained in routine knowledge would have
poorly compensated us for what he must have lost in spontaneity”; Rand, A Knight, 16.
426
Rev. William Reid, Sketch of the Life and Oratory of John B. Gough (London, 1854), 22-23;
Rand, A Knight, 55.
427
Rand, A Knight, 154-5: “For the sake of the young let me earnestly say that we must not close
our eyes to the importance of this fact, work. A bar of iron that is worth five dollars can be turned
into horseshoes worth $10.50. Work longer and harder on that iron bar. You can separate it into
needles that will bring you $355. Split it up into the blades of penknives, and your labor will
bring you $3,295. Make one more trial. Instead of these horseshoes, needles, or penknives,
stretch out the iron into the balance-springs of watches. Your five-dollar bar will net you
$250,000. So much for work, work, work…”
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human effort and as a parable in the striving for something of a more abstract greatness or
usefulness. (“Greatness is like money, it is easier won than held.”) 428
The biographers brought home for the young readers the morals embedded in Gough’s
life story. Remarking on young Gough’s arrival in New York City in 1829 (which recalls the
young Franklin in Philadelphia in 1723), Rev. Rand asked the reader pointedly, “What would
you do alone in a big city, entering it as a stranger, wanting to go somewhere and wanting to do
something, but utterly at a loss as to place or pursuit?” Continuing in the use of the second
person, he urged the reader to “[p]ut yourself in the place of that boy of fourteen,” to “[g]et under
his trunk,” and to “[m]ake his situation your own” – “what would you have done?” Rev. Reid
made sure that people read Gough’s experience as relevant and instructive to their own: “The
course of John Gough has been that of thousands who have betaken themselves to our large cities
to push their way in the world. Snares are planted in every path and the young are required to
avoid them at the time when they are least aware of their existence, and have least power to resist
their seductive influence.” 429 Rev. Martyn’s study of Gough’s early character was clearly meant
to encourage the readers to examine themselves for signs of future glory. “You know it not today, if still young,” he wrote, “but there is something about you inevitably indicating what you
will be by and by.” He made the study of a great man an opportunity for self-discovery and selfdevelopment and an exercise with high stakes: “It will be lamentable if you make a mistake – if,
by the frost of any careless living to-day, you blight tomorrow’s flower.” 430
428
Martyn, Apostle of Cold Water, 321.
429
Reid, Sketch, 22.
430
Martyn, Apostle of Cold Water, 20.
171
It would be wrong, however, to assume that Gough’s biographies were simply a rehash of
the Franklinesque self-made man story. The clerical biographers gave more than an account of
the individual’s efforts that made up his personal greatness. Looming over the great reformer,
there was an even greater figure in the biographies – that of the Christian woman. “Two women
were this reformer’s guardian angels,” Rev. Martyn declared, “First, his mother; when he lost her
he lost himself. Next, Mary Gough; when he found her he found himself.” 431 Gough’s life, in
other words, can be seen as seven years of dissipation (in the world of men) bracketed by the
company and moral guidance of Christian women. 432 It was the mother who planted in the son
the seeds of religion and the habit of prayer, which might later be forgotten or buried due to their
separation but never erased; and it was the Christian wife who re-awakened the husband’s
dormant religious feelings and persuaded him to rejoin the church. 433
To these women, the clerical biographers sang paeans worthy of the saints. An emblem of
the long-suffering and self-sacrificing Christian woman, Gough’s mother, “after the manner of
her sex, put up with self-denial so that it was changed to coronation” (emphasis added). 434
Gough’s second wife, Mary, “[l]ike Mary of old…proved by her life-work that deep in her heart
was planted the element of consecration.” 435 “What child of misfortune has not found help in
woman?” Rev. Reid asked, “At every turn in John Gough’s life, we find her like a ministering
431
Martyn, Apostle of Cold Water, xiv.
432
Gough’s “turning away from home” and to “an unworthy social circle” was the direct cause
of his downfall, according to Rev. Rand, but Gough’s first wife presented a challenge to the story.
Rev. Martyn suggested that she had married Gough in order to “reform him” and her failure
brought on her death. See Rand, A Knight, 75-6 and Martyn, Apostle of Cold Water, 67.
433
Martyn, Apostle of Cold Water, 105; Reid, Sketch, 5.
434
Martyn, Apostle of Cold Water, 18.
435
Rand, A Knight, 130.
172
angel waiting on him.” 436 Indeed, the biographies can be read as a eulogy of Christian
womanhood, as much as the story of a self-made man.
Not only were the female influence and feminine qualities celebrated, but they prevailed
over men’s in the biographies. Gough’s mother’s influence on the boy overcame his father’s
effort to toughen him up and to make a soldier of him. Gough himself also came in for praise:
“Probably nothing saved him (from a soldier’s fate) but the feminine delicacy of his
temperament, his dread of physical pain, and his early withdrawal from the scene (of
Sandgate).” 437 Gough’s sensibility made him a soldier “of a grander type,” according to Rev.
Martyn, “a moral hero, whose campaigns were as real as they were bloodless, and whose
peaceful victories were ‘no less renowned than war.’” 438
Rev. Reid discovered in Gough’s mother “a heroism outrivaling her husband’s courage
on the field of battle.” “Within many a woman’s heart,” he argued, “there is a courage which no
annals of bravery can surpass; and on the humble sphere of domestic life there have often been
prepared better blessings for the world than the greatest victory ever secured.” 439 Even the
minister himself took a backseat here to the mothers and wives, and the church to the home. “It is
the home-life,” Rev. Rand maintained, “that should go down to the strongest motives and lay
hold of them, even as a man in building strive to touch a strong, rock foundation.” 440 Home or
436
Reid, Sketch, 15.
437
Rev. Rand saw Sandgate as a place full of “rampant militarism” (with its castle ruins and
cross-channel smuggling activities). See Rand, A Knight, 24.
438
Martyn, Apostle of Cold Water, 24.
439
Reid, Sketch, 9-10.
440
Rand, A Knight, 72.
173
“home-life” (and its womenfolk) seems to have become the new rock upon which the church was
to be built; indeed, it was the church reincarnated.
The clerical biographers’ accolades for Christian women showcased the special affinity
that existed between the “feminized” (disestablished, de-Calvinized, and sentimental) minister
and his increasingly female-majority flock in the mid-to-late 19th century. Ann Douglas studied
the cultural process of feminization at work in the American context, the most puerile (and yet
popular) form of which, she suggests, the English Victorians had somehow managed to avoid
due to their greater sophistication and “cultural cohesiveness.” 441 But it would seem that in the
case of Gough’s biographies, British or American, the clerical authors spoke the same language
of Christian sentimentality, and they (and their readers) would have understood one another
perfectly across the Atlantic. The only difference, in hindsight, is that the British dissenters who
embraced liberal theology and feminine virtue weren’t nearly so numerous and socially
influential as their American brethren. 442
Gough’s biographies were intended as much for the young men, as for their mothers.
After all, it was expected that mothers would buy and read the biography for and with their sons.
They were encouraged to emulate Gough’s mother in inculcating early religious impressions, to
discover and cultivate the early signs of greatness in their sons, and to guard them against bad
social company and moral pollutions. The moral of the biographies was, after all, that had Gough
been accompanied by a Christian mother or wife, he would never have fallen. In the final
analysis, Gough’s biographies weren’t so much replicas of the self-made man story any more;
they served rather to domesticate and Christianize the self-made man, a task Gough had
441
Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (1977; rep., New York, 1998), 5.
442
This also explains why the Sunday School movement and the temperance movement in
Britain, for example, never flourished to the same extent as their counterparts did in the U.S..
174
deliberately taken on in his second autobiography. They expunged the Franklinesque elements
from Gough’s original story, and they taught that the greatness of the self-made man can be
found perhaps less in the man himself than in the tempering influence of Christian womanhood.
443
Gough’s self-making was significantly not a story of the return of the prodigal son to his
father, according to the clerical biographers, but a re-discovery (with the aid of his Christian wife)
of “his mother’s Bible” and “his mother’s God.” 444
Gough in 1930
When Honoré Morrow’s biography of Gough came out in 1930, memories of the great dramatic
orator had already begun to fade. To be sure, Gough still lived on in elocution textbooks, selfhelp readings, and temperance histories, and his autobiography still graced the bookshelves of
many a home library, but even Morrow herself (b. 1880) was too young to have heard (or if she
did, remembered) Gough lecture.
Morrow certainly wasn’t the first woman writer who had ever taken an interest in
Gough’s life, but she was the only biographer, man or woman, who had since written anything
other than a formulaic didactic story. 445 Her book answered to the new critical demand,
443
The Franklin I refer to here is not the purified version of the 19th century, but the mundane
and jovial old man of the 18th, who advised the appearance of industry as highly as its reality and
who cracked jokes with the great evangelist George Whitefield.
444
Rand, A Knight, 75; Martyn, Apostle of Cold Water, 50. The re-discovery of “his mother’s
Bible” was actually realized and staged in 1857. The bible was claimed to have been lost by
Gough in a groggery in Bristol, RI, “some fifteen years ago,” and was recovered “in the corner of
an old attic,” through the agency of the daughter of Rev. John Overton Choules, and it was
presented to Gough in 1857 just in time for his departure for his second tour of England. See
“John B. Gough’s Farewell Address,” Worcester (MA) Daily Transcript, July 10, 1857.
445
She explained the “circumstances” that prevented Gough from obtaining an education funded
by the Allen Street Methodist Society (about which Gough did not give any details in his
autobiography) as a result of his youthful dalliance with the daughter (“of the dimpled and
buxom type that is an inevitable and deadly meance to the adolescent as well as the older male”)
175
emerging in the late 19th century, which prized biographical details and psychological profiling
over their didactic value. Whereas the suppression of certain (personal) facets/details of a public
person’s life was desirably suited to the didactic purpose of the Victorian biography, critics at the
turn of the century demanded a more “rounded, multifaceted character.” They asked to be shown
the “whole truth” (without, however, descending into scandal-mongering sensational journalism),
and they championed the reader’s right to know over the biographical subject’s right to
privacy. 446
The “truth” that critics and readers demanded was not necessarily the strictest adherence
to known facts, but that something which would come across as true to character. Morrow took
greater liberty than anyone else with Gough’s life (as publicized in the autobiography), muddling
the line between a biography and a novel (for which she was criticized). To be sure, she did not
alter the main story line of Gough’s life, but she inserted entire (fictional) episodes and
conversations to round out the characters and to enliven her narrative. For example, not only did
she spice up Gough’s “drugging” story in 1845 by adding that a woman “accosted him with the
ancient suggestion,” Morrow came up with another story of Gough’s abduction in London by a
“cabby.” This time, however, Gough was able to get out of the trap by burning down the house!
Similarly, she made the dramatic orator an enraptured patron and later a promoter of T. S.
Arthur’s popular stage play, Ten Nights in a Bar Room. Gough, according to her, visited a theater
in Cincinnati during his aimless wandering about in the city. 447 It was her sensationalistic, yet
of the landlady he boarded with. This is as close as she came to moralizing. Morrow, Tiger!
Tiger! The Life Story of John B. Gough (New York, 1930), 45.
446
For an excellent discussion of the changes in biographical convention at the turn of the 20th
century, see Scott E. Casper, Constructing American Lives, 312-318.
447
Morrow, Tiger! Tiger!, 184-187, 197-201.
176
not entirely out of character, portrayal of Gough that gave rise to the concern that readers not
already familiar with the facts of his autobiography wouldn’t be able to tell facts from fiction. 448
It was not Morrow’s goal to make a saint of the lecturer, or just to rehash his
autobiography, but it was to make him interesting and “human” for the 20th century. An
important component of his humanity, Morrow decided, was the psychological and physiological
struggle against alcoholism. The constant battle with the prowling “tiger,” and his repeated
setbacks and comebacks, became the main theme of the biography, instead of the 19th century
version of the Christian remaking of the self-made man. This made her portrayal of Gough “true
to life” for the 20th century readers, who were obsessed with psychology and psychic crises. 449
The Los Angeles Times praised the author of the “imaginative biography”:
She does not gloss over any of Gough’s weaknesses nor try to cover up his many falls
from grace, but she always sees him as a man hard-beset by passions, who yet
consistently tried to control himself and to save others from the curse that was laid upon
him. 450
What made Morrow’s biography uniquely her own was her portrayal of the women who
had influenced Gough’s life. The women in her story ceased to be the long-suffering victims and
the self-effacing wives that the ministers touted in the didactic biographies. They were strongwilled, independent women who did not shy away from political or public action without,
however, being stiff-necked radicals. For the first time, she depicted Gough’s parents’ marriage
448
Florence Finch Kelly, “Rum and John Gough,” New York Times, Feb. 16, 1930.
449
For the popular concern over neurasthenia and the emergence of a therapeutic culture in the
fin-de-siècle America, see T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Anti-Modernism and the
Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (New York, 1981), Ch. 1.
450
Los Angeles Times, Mar. 9, 1930.
177
as an incompatible and unhappy one. 451 Jane Gough, under her pen, clashed with her husband
over the choice of their church (she being a Baptist and he a Methodist), stating that she would
not give in to her husband’s wish but would only do “as my conscience directs.” 452 Likewise,
Morrow turned Mary Whitcomb, Gough’s second wife, whose view on the woman question was
in reality quite conservative, into Gough’s mentor on the issue of women’s public leadership and
political activism, and Frances E. Willard, with the help of Mary Gough, became the instrument
of Gough’s conversion to the public support of an independent women’s movement (WCTU)
and a political campaign for Prohibition. 453
Morrow was a self-revealing writer, and she wrote herself into the biography. She was
born in Iowa to transplanted New Englanders and was a graduate of the University of Wisconsin.
She wrestled with the Victorian social expectations for women. Apparently, she could not bear
children, and she divorced her first husband (Willsie) in 1922 before marrying again in 1932 to
William Morrow, the publisher. She explored social and familial issues through fiction,
including interracial romance and women’s right to divorce. She was also genuinely concerned
about the moral and societal decline brought on, as she saw it, by the influx of southern
Europeans and the dwindling population of the WASP race. According to biographer Frederic
Taber Cooper, this prompted her to write about the Reclamation Service and the West, where the
“old stock Americans” predominated. 454 In Tiger! Tiger!, she revamped the self-made man story
451
“The boy (Gough) was old and keen enough now to realize that his parents were so
essentially different that they never could agree on important matters.” Morrow, Tiger! Tiger!,
11.
452
Morrow, Tiger! Tiger!, 12.
453
Morrow, Tiger! Tiger!, 203-4, 271-2, 279-87, 288-293.
454
Frederic Taber Cooper, Honoré Willsie Morrow: A Sketch (New York, n.d.), 5. Cooper was
also rather defensive about the interracial marriage consummated in Morrow’s popular Western
178
as the drama of a man’s constant struggle with his inner demon and a showcase of strong-minded
women. Gough was still the hero, but a hero brought down to size (if not dwarfed by the women).
It was moralistic without being moralizing, sensational without being voyeuristic. It marked one
direction in which the Victorian bildungsroman of the self-made man was turning, from didactic
biography to historical fiction. Gough had become more flesh and blood, endowed with the inner
feelings and weaknesses of a “rounded, multifaceted character,” and at once more immaterial
(lessening the moral demand on readers). 455
But Morrow’s biographical novel wasn’t the only kind of memory about Gough being
passed on in 1930. Edward Van Every’s book of 19th century sporting journal memorabilia, Sins
of New York, signaled another turn that Gough was to take in popular culture. He was to become
a symbol of Victorian hypocrisy and the curiosity of a by-gone era, if not the butt of a (men’s)
joke. Van Every’s book came out in the same year as Morrow’s biography and was published by
her old publisher, Frederick A. Stokes. 456 A sports journalist and a biographer of famous
pugilists, Van Every was a cultural descendent of the 19th century sporting men and his
publications represented not only the survival but the resurgence of the culture of the
“masculine” man against Victorian femininization. 457 Sins of New York featured true crime
novel, The Heart of the Desert (1913), which was unusual for its time. According to Cooper, it
was “an open secret” that Morrow’s original ending was the couple (an Apache Indian and a
white woman)’s separation (“even then she sensed the tragedy involved in such ill-starred
union”), but “a more orthodox ‘happy ending’” was demanded by the publishers for popular
circulation. Ibid., 3. I’d take Cooper’s word with a grain of salt.
455
Casper, Constructing American Lives, 318.
456
Edward Van Every, Sins of New York: As “Exposed” by the Police Gazette (New York, 1930),
three printings, Oct. 15, Oct. 23, and Oct. 30.
457
Van Every was the biographer of William Muldoon, the champion wrestler and personal
trainer for the pugilist John L. Sullivan; and later of Joe Louis, the black boxing champion. For
the resurgence of masculinity from the late 19th century, see E. Anthony Rotundo, American
179
stories, famous scandals (including Gough’s), and racy illustrations culled from the old issues of
the National Police Gazette, edited by George Wilkes and Enoch Camp after 1845 and Richard
Kyle Fox after 1877. It did away with any pretense of moralizing and even mocked the righteous
tone of the early Gazette editors. 458 For the first time in seventy years, the public was reacquainted with the story of Gough’s fall in New York City from a source other than Gough’s
own account (the last publication of the Police Gazette story was during the Gough-Lees
controversy in 1858). The story, titled “The Trials of the Tippling Temperance Talker,” was reprinted along with a full-page reproduction of an engraving of “Beauty and the Beer” (Fig. 5)
featuring “the dashing daughter of a brewer,” with her skirt flying and ankles showing, driving a
cart loaded with beer kegs as “a pretty girl’s practical protest against teetotalism.” 459
Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York,
1993), Ch. 10 and Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and
Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago, 1995), 19-20.
458
George Wilkes, for example, branded himself a moral crusader while exposing Gough in the
New York scandal of 1845.
459
The engraving itself does not have to do with the Gough scandal. Van Every did not always
have the engravings conform to the text. The same image was picked out and reprinted in a New
York Times book review. It is very likely that many (male) readers were on their lookout for the
illustration in the book and must have come across the Police Gazette story on Gough.
180
Fig. 5. Beauty and the Beer.
Source: Edward Van Every, Sins of New York (1930)
Introducing Sins of New York, Franklin P. Adams, a well-known newspaper columnist,
treated the old Police Gazette crime stories, or rather the 19th century journalistic rendering of
the stories, as quaint and laughable idiosyncrasies of a by-gone era. The later Police Gazette (the
Gazette that Richard Kyle Fox had turned since 1877 into a “pink periodical” of sensations and
sports) became part of the old boys’ collective reminiscences of their adolescence in the ‘80s and
‘90s. Adams fondly recalled staring at the ankle-showing women and sensational crimes scenes
printed in the Police Gazette, which he could only find at Frank’s barber shop in Chicago, a
haunt for local boys “whose faces never needed Frank’s razor oftener than once a week.” And he
181
added, tongue-in-cheek and no doubt with the ministers and Sunday school teachers in mind, that
poring over those pictures did not send him or any of his playmates to the jail or the poor house.
Rather, the only moral for him was that “nothing does youth much harm. Or good.” 460
Sins of New York made light of Victorian sensibility and even the Police Gazette itself,
which operated on the fringes and sometimes in opposition to the Victorian mainstream. It was a
light-hearted read for men – not only to be enjoyed by old boys as a shared adolescent
experience, but by their sons and grandsons as an entertaining curiosity of the gas-lit era.
Reaching into the past was not only for the “Old Gentlemen” like Adams, who grew up in the
1880s-90s, to regain a measure of their “Vanished Virility,” but for them to connect with their
sons and grandsons as men. Men of the next generations would be writing about the 1930s and
its popular tabloids with as much amusement and curiosity as Adams and Van Every did about
the quaint Police Gazette, and they would surely laugh at the “Old Gentlemen,” as the latter did
at the Gazette readers, for “get[ting] a kick out of those outworn one-hoss shays of
journalism.” 461
Many men would have heard of the Gough scandal for the first time in the 1930s through
Sins of New York. The story was no doubt new to many readers, but the message was clear
enough: Gough and his story of entrapment were typical of the Victorian (and clerical) hypocrisy
about women and drink. Gough would be passed down this line of “masculine” memories of the
sporting men as nothing but a “tippling temperance talker” and a curiosity of the past – of the
hypocritical (feminized) Victorian era.
460
Van Every, Sins of New York, v-vi.
461
Ibid., vii.
182
Sins of New York stood for what some moral critics deplored as the moral decline of
modern American society. It was this kind of publication (which would “proudly
present…scandals of the past as authentic history”) that the critics named in contrast to
Morrow’s historical novels of great men, which were “timely” and a “tonic” for “the American
spirit.” 462 Though seen as complete opposites (and probably catering to different readerships),
Morrow’s and Van Every’s re-creations of Gough both deviated from the didactic tradition
(didactic biographies of Gough were still being produced in the 1930s 463 ) and fed on the public
fascination with the sensational details of a celebrity/notoriety’s life. Both, in their own ways,
had become the undoing of the Victorian evangelical culture, the pedestal on which Gough’s
fame stood. When the foundation caved in, Gough ceased to be a hero, he became merely a man
and a curiosity.
From Lecturer to Elocutionist
As widely printed and read as Gough’s autobiographies and biographies were his lectures,
published in newspapers, tracts, and collected volumes. 464 Some worried that printing Gough’s
lectures verbatim would be inadvisable, as he was “so much of a repeating orator,” and should
his lectures be committed to texts, they would “lose much of their pity and force.” 465 And yet
462
Laura Bell Everett, “Timely Novels,” Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine (San
Francisco) 89:4 (Apr. 1931), 121.
463
See, for example, Rev. Harry Malcolm Chalfant, These Agitators and Their Ideas (Nashville,
TN, 1931).
464
It was estimated that “over a million copies of his lectures have been sold, and over a hundred
thousand of his autobiography.” See Rand, A Knight, 187.
465
Journal of the Union (New York), Oct. 1857; newspapers, such as Leander Streeter’s Boston
Daily Star, had always tried to publish full-length reports of Gough’s lectures, but the first
attempt at publishing Gough’s lectures (mix of reports and original texts) in a single volume was
made by Wm. Tweedie in 1854, in the wake of his successful debut in London.
183
instead of wearing out public interest, Gough was able to repeat the same stories (albeit rearranged in order or context) in front of an audience with great success during his lifetime. His
lectures were not only read, but recited and reenacted by others on various occasions; some of
his choicest passages became stock pieces in popular elocution and recitation handbooks
published between 1865 and 1910.
Not only did people read and recite Gough’s lectures, they paid to hear them re-delivered
and re-performed by imitators. In fact, quite a few rode Gough’s coattails to fame by doing
public recitations of his lectures or giving impersonations of the famous orator. Helen Potter, a
popular dramatic reader, became known in the 1870s and 80s for her impersonations of lyceum
celebrities. She made over $20,000 in her second season alone, and Gough was one of her
signature performances. 466 William Noble, the founder of the Blue Ribbon Gospel Temperance
Movement in England, claimed to have embarked on his public speaking career in the early ‘70s
by having Gough’s orations placed in his hand by his mother and by redelivering these addresses
for thirteen evenings straight at the National Standard Theater in London, attracting some 75,000
people in total. 467 E. Tennyson Smith, a temperance lecturer, made his name by giving public
recitals of Gough lectures in Britain, Australia, and New Zealand, and the effects he produced
were so close to the original that he was dubbed “The Second Gough.” 468 Russell H. Conwell,
the Baptist minister famous for his “Acres of Diamonds” speech, cited Gough as his inspiration
466
James Burton Pond, Eccentricities of Genius; Memories of Famous Men and Women of the
Platform and Stage (New York, 1900), 171.
467
He was allegedly one of the pallbearers at Gough’s funeral in Worcester, MA. “Mr. William
Noble,” Railway Signal (London) 10, No. 5 (May, 1892), 89-90.
468
“Tennyson Smith and Gough,” Zion’s Herald (Boston), Jan. 4, 1905; for his exploits in
Australia and New Zealand, see, for example, Grey River Argus (Greymouth, NZ), Aug. 21,
1891, and The Advertiser (Adelaide, AU), Oct. 26, 1911.
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and mentor, who had introduced him to the platform in 1862. In 1875, Gough enjoyed such a
high stature in public eyes that he publicly endorsed Ann Eliza Young’s crusade against
Mormonism and wrote an introduction for her best-selling exposé of Mormon polygamy, Wife
No. 19, or the Story of a Life in Bondage. 469
That Gough was able to mesmerize an audience on a well-worn theme or with an oft-told
story, as we know, is largely due to his dramatic performance and his spontaneous adaptability.
The proliferation of the texts of his lectures owes as much to the temperance publishing houses
as to the popular elocution movement in the latter half of the 19th century. Concomitant with the
flourishing lyceums and Chautauquas of the Gilded Age, the elocution movement was an
outgrowth of the self-improvement-cum-leisure culture. The same people who attended lyceum
lectures and Chautauqua shows wanted to improve their own rhetorical skills; and they were told
that rhetorical education was no longer just necessary to the traditional public careers of law,
politics, and pulpit – nor should it be confined to the college curriculum. It was desirable for
everybody, and for the pleasurable enjoyment of private life. The goal of rhetorical education
was, according to Mrs. J. W. Shoemaker, a popular elocution instructor, “the enlargement and
elevation of human personality through the proper cultivation of the power of expression.” 470 It
was not just a professional tool but an essential part of personality development and selfrealization.
469
The exposé has recently been turned into a historical fiction and crime thriller by David
Ebershoff. Ebershoff, The 19th Wife: A Novel (New York, 2008). Ebershoff pulled out Gough’s
preface, and instead, fabricated an introduction by Harriet Beecher Stowe. (Such is fame.)
470
Mrs. J. W. Shoemaker, Advanced Elocution: Designed as a Practical Treatise for Teachers
and Students in Vocal Training, Articulation, Physical Culture and Gesture (Philadelphia, 1896),
3.
185
Along with public lecturers like Gough, who got paid for delivering original addresses,
there emerged a new profession of “elocutionists,” who earned their living by doing public
readings of well-known literary and oratorical pieces and by teaching the art of elocution to the
general public. 471 They suggested that not only did lay people need a system of knowledge,
simplified and condensed from the academic version, about the mechanics of elocution, but they
also needed to improve through practice. One of the best exercises, according to contemporary
thought, was to recite the “great works” – not merely to repeat the oration word for word but to
emulate the manner and, more difficultly, the “passions” of the orator.
For about half a century between 1865 and 1915, Gough’s lectures were the stock pieces
in the anthologies of “great works” in popular elocution manuals and reciters. Some of his
frequently quoted passages include “The Pilot,” the (fictional) story of a heroic steam-boat pilot
who succeeds in running his burning boat on shore and saving the passengers while sacrificing
his own life 472 ; “The Power of Habit,” a parable of the danger of moderate drinking, which
pictures a heedless pleasure party floating down a seemingly placid river headed for the fatal
plunge over the Niagara Falls, despite repeated warnings of the rapids ahead; and “The
Apostrophe to Water” (under different titles), a eulogy of the divine qualities of pure water and a
flight of rhetoric serving as the climax of an address 473 . Selected for elocutionary exercise and
471
Thomas A. Hyde and William Hyde, A Natural System of Elocution and Oratory, Founded on
an Analysis of the Human Constitution, considered in its three-fold nature – mental,
physiological and expressional (New York, 1886), 6.
472
The story of John Maynard, widely attributed to Gough but by no means invented by him,
was immortalized by the German Naturalist writer, Theodor Fontane, in a ballad that some
German school children still recite. See George Salomon, “John Maynard of Lake Erie: The
Genesis of a Legend,” Niagara Frontier 10:3 (Autumn 1964), 73-86.
473
This was attributed to Gough, but disputed by some as originated by a Methodist camp
meeting preacher, Paul Denton. See Daily Cleveland Herald (Cleveland, OH), Feb. 1, 1861.
186
(obviously) for moral edification, these passages were supposed to be recited and performed
before a private or public audience with both intellectual and moral benefits. 474
The popularization of Gough as an elocutionary model for the general public created a
contradiction of ideals between the ministers and the elocutionists. As we see in Chapter Three,
though favorable to populist homiletics and open to lay preaching, the ministers were adamant
that the best preaching came straight from the heart, unrestrained by the mind. Gough was
praised for being the most natural public speaker, with a born talent, and his type of dramatic
speaking was defined against the theatrical variety and was justified by its being entirely
spontaneous, untrained, and therefore “artless.” In theory, Gough should have no value for the
emulators, as he had no “art” and could not be copied without raising the question of moral
duplicity. In the elocution manuals, however, Gough became an artist among the many. Though
it was maintained that nothing would ever be reproduced to equal the lecturer’s original effects,
the students were nonetheless encouraged to approximate his manner of speaking with
elocutionary instructions. The elocutionists held out the hope that there was something about the
“artless” orator that people could study and emulate after all.
Helen Potter’s impersonation handbook gave people such a shot at greatness. In giving an
account of her Gough impersonation, Potter acknowledged that “[a]ny attempt to impersonate his
rare gift of mimicry, his pathos and humor, must, perforce, fall short of the original.” But of
course, she continued to give detailed instructions on how to pull off the impression, including
notes on the delivery (tones, breaks, accentuation, down to the minute detail of how Gough
474
Nan Johnson, “The Popularization of Nineteenth Century Rhetoric,” in Gregory Clark and S.
Michael Halloran, eds., Oratorical Culture in Nineteenth Century America: Transformations in
the Theory and Practice of Rhetoric (Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL, 1993),148.
187
habitually acted before a lecture 475 ) and costumes (apart from a wig and a fake beard, female
players were advised to wear a dress coat and vest over a plain black broadcloth skirt and to use
a low curtain or screen, running from the entrance to the podium, to conceal the skirt). She
cautioned that the Gough impression should not be attempted without the actor being “in full
sympathy” with the lecturer and his subject. “Neither the subject nor the lecturer should be
caricatured,” she emphasized, as “the public will not accept it,” and because “Mr. Gough is
cherished in the hearts of the people, and his memory revered.” 476
Fig. 6. Helen Potter as Gough
Source: Helen Potter, Helen Potter’s Impersonations (1891)
475
The actor/ress is supposed to enter the character the moment he/she steps on the platform.
476
Helen Potter, Helen Potter’s Impersonations (n.p., 1891), 6.
188
Admittedly, impersonation was, for Potter, no mere imitation of sound, intonation,
likeness, and manner (“the outer senses”); it required “an inner sense” (which she defined as
“intuition” or “the sixth sense”) that she urged the students of the elocutionary and histrionic art
to seek out. For her own Gough impression, for example, she “never undertook the
impersonation without a silent invocation, or prayer, for the right spirit to go out with the words,
that they might bear the power of conviction with them, and reach the souls of all within reach of
her voice.” By stressing the “inner sense” or the “right spirit,” she was not discounting the
possibility of a successful reproduction, but was rejecting the formulaic acting of melodrama; her
emphasis on the “inner” over the “outer” senses points to the modern histrionic emphasis on
character study and identification. 477
Gough may have been a difficult subject for emulation, but he was no longer
“inimitable.” Commenting on E. Tennyson Smith’s performance of a Gough lecture, the Grey
River Argus of Greymouth, New Zealand wrote:
[Gough’s lectures] were unique of their kind, and impossible to all mere imitators. No
one but a trained elocutionist and consummate actor could follow Gough in the style of
temperance lecture he founded.
Smith was “so close a copy” of Gough and was able to deliver Gough’s lectures “with such
power and naturalness,” because he had “studied his model faithfully.” 478 To stage the Gough
character was a feat that required careful study and perhaps the skills of a professional, but it was,
for all intents and purposes, doable.
Gough’s stepping off the platform and into the elocution manuals and reenactments not
only solidified and extended his celebrity; it indicated an interesting twist in the evolution of the
477
Ibid., ix-x, 6.
478
Grey River Argus (Greymouth, NZ), Aug. 21, 1891
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Victorian cult of sincerity. Elocution was considered an art (and a science) of outward form,
which revolved on the cultivation of vocal skills and physical expressions and consisted of a
system of definable rules. The public enthusiasm for elocution naturally raised the specter of
insincerity that forever haunted the Victorian middle class – that people would practice the art of
elocution without revealing their natural inner feelings. The elocution manual writers had to
contend with this perpetual fear of hypocrisy somehow – some even faulted others for
overemphasizing the “external signs of elocution” while overlooking the “inner spirit.” 479 They
argued that art did not necessarily lead to the obscuration of nature; instead, if properly trained,
one may use art to guide and refine natural passions. “Passion…may know more than art,” Allen
A. Griffith, a popular elocution instructor, wrote, “but art sometimes knows better than
passion.” 480 The elocutionary art was thus necessary to the promotion and realization of one’s
natural self.
Indeed, the elocutionists argued that the perfection of self cannot be achieved but through
the conjunction of art and nature. Some even suggested that art and nature were potentially
transferable and that some of our “natural” traits were but a form of habituation by art. If the
training were persistent, it would form a “habit” (a second nature, if you will) and “a part of the
personal talents of the man.” Great oratory like Gough’s, especially when read aloud and
repeated, was conducive to the cultivation of a “taste” that was to inform one’s “natural” style. 481
Art, under the right circumstances, seems to have morphed into nature itself.
479
Hyde and Hyde, A Natural System of Elocution and Oratory, 6.
480
Allen A. Griffith, Class-Book in Oratory: A Complete Drill Book for Practice of the
Principles of Vocal Physiology and for Acquiring the Art of Elocution and Oratory (24th ed., St.
Louis, 1879), 4.
481
Ibid., 3-4.
190
The possibility of a dialectic resolution of the “art versus nature” problem may not have
eased the Victorian anxiety over practical deception (or theatrics). It reflected a compromise
approach to the central dilemma of late Victorian culture, as conceived by historian Karen
Halttunen. This was the delicate balance between sincerity or authenticity and refinement. 482
When caught between “what we feel ourselves” and “what we ought to feel” in an elocutionary
exercise, instead of conforming expressions to feelings (as antebellum advice manuals would
probably suggest), the reader was now told to “call up, from taste [being a cultural product of
rhetorical training], some ideal rule to settle an uncertainty of opinion.”483 In the end, the self
abdicated its power of arbitration on the ethical question of authenticity versus pretense, which
was then reduced to a question of rhetoric to be decided by some definable rule of the
elocutionary “science” – rules that the “great men” like Gough were supposed to teach.
Thus, the elocutionary exercise came dangerously close to acting, which also had its own
rules of physical movement and vocalization to fall back on. Some elocutionists even suggested
that elocutionary exhibitions “occup[ied] a position midway between the lecture platform and the
stage, avoiding on the one hand the dry details and matter of fact of the former, and the doubtful
propriety of attendance on the latter.” Elocution was important, because it was useful to all,
“public speakers” or “those who seek merely for voice improvement.” It also attracted all. Even
the most “[f]astidious people can attend a course of readings who could not with propriety visit a
theatre.” 484 Gough had become both the author and the inspiration of this new form of
elocutionary entertainment.
482
Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in
America, 1830-1870 (New Haven, CT, 1982).
483
Griffith, Class Book in Oratory, 4.
484
Hyde and Hyde, A Natural System of Elocution and Oratory, 6-7.
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Celebrity, Temperance, and Self-Making
The cult of Gough, which emerged in the mid-to-late 1840s, peaked in the 1870s and 1880s, and
then quickly dissipated in the 1930s (see chart 2). 485
Chart 2. Google Ngram Search with “John B. Gough”
As he branched out into other (not strictly temperance-related) topics after his second British tour,
Gough successfully transformed himself from a reformed drunkard and a temperance advocate
into a moral entertainer and a public celebrity. He did this, partly, through the careful editing and
repackaging of his autobiography, turning the story of a drunkard’s recovery into that of his
material and spiritual self-making; it was also done for him by the evangelical minister-literati,
who, for the sake of their readers, whitewashed Gough’s past and Christianized and domesticated
the self-made man (while touting the Christ-like qualities of Christian women). What’s more,
Gough became involved in the post-war popular elocution movement, as sort of a grassroots
extension of the commercial lyceums and Chautauquas. His lectures became a model for popular
485
Google NGram Viewer, input search “John B. Gough,” accessed June 6, 2013.
192
imitation and recitation and promised concrete elocutionary skills for self-promotion aside from
moral edification.
It was no coincidence that Gough reached his peak of fame in the 1870s-80s. His
popularity was indicative of the success of the cult of the self-made man. In his study of the
“self-made” celebrity in American history, Leo Braudy points out that “[t]he element of theater
is central to the concept of the self-made man, because it binds together its spiritual and material
aspects… [by] transforming the internal sanctions of the old morality into external structures of
behavior and self-display” (emphasis mine). He observes that the popularization of the myth of
the self-made man in America coincided with the waning of the anti-theatrical prejudice and the
“new willingness to believe in outward signs of election and spiritual transcendence” in the
1870s-80s. 486 Gough negotiated the conflicted cultural terrain of the Gilded Age, and he hit upon
the right alchemy, the right balance of the material and the spiritual. He was able to put on an
affective self-display with the appearance of sincerity (“anti-theatrical drama”) and his moral
drama was embraced by an audience who were ready and willing to believe.
It was no surprise, either, that Gough’s fame fell off rather abruptly in the 1930s (after a
very gradual decline over four decades). The very cultural pillars and religious sanctions that
propped up his celebrity collapsed, undermined not only from without, by the new “masculine”
men, like Edward Van Every and Franklin P. Adams, 487 but from within, by the new women like
486
Leo Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History (New York and Oxford, 1986),
510-11. Theater historian Claudia Johnson also identifies the latter half of the 19th century as
when the rapprochement between the church and the stage began. See Claudia Johnson, Church
and Stage: The Theater as Target of Religious Condemnation in Nineteenth Century America
(Jefferson, NC, 2008), Ch. 11.
487
They were hardly Honoré Morrow’s “old stock Americans.” Franklin Pierce Adams, born
Franklin Leopold Adams, changed his middle name to “Pierce” at age 13. His father, Moses
Adam, a German Jew, had changed his name to the more respectable Adams. He married into a
third generation German Jewish family in Chicago. See Sally Ashley, F. P. A.: The Life and
193
Honoré Morrow, descendents of New England evangelical Protestantism, who half-openly
rebelled against the Victorian stereotype of women.
In the end, Gough’s fame did not outlive his times, paradoxically, because of his
popularity. The popular lecturer (or reformer) who abides by the rules of the market does not tell
his/her audience what they need to know, but what they want to hear. Part of Gough’s post-war
transition was to make his lectures unobtrusive and pleasantly amusing (such as by telling stories
of his foreign travels) for a mass audience weary of political controversies. He no longer insisted
on total abstinence for all, and he dragged his feet when it came to Prohibition. His popularity
depended as much on his dramatic skills as on his knack of knowing and humoring his audience.
Temperance, too, had undergone changes. From an expression of spiritual aspiration for selfperfection in the 1830s, and the Samaritan act of brotherly love in the 1840s, temperance had
become, by the 1870s, primarily an outward measure of Protestant middle-class respectability
(especially when drunkenness was associated with Catholic immigrants) and an ingredient in
one’s personal success. As Gough had implied in 1869, drinking wasn’t nearly half as bad or
“sinful” as appearing drunk in public, which could damage one’s “influence for good,”
especially for a public personality like himself. 488 Rather than having a clean conscience,
Gough’s last word of advice to the aspiring young men was, fittingly, “Keep your record
clean!” 489
Times of Franklin Pierce Adams (New York: Beaufort Books, 1986), 23-25. Van Every’s
parentage and history are somewhat murkier. He may have lost his father early on. His mother,
Whilemina [sic] Van Every, listed in the 1900 federal census as head of household, was a first
generation immigrant from Germany. Van Every may have been a fire insurance clerk before he
turned to journalism.
488
Gough, Autobiography and Personal recollections, 329-330.
489
This was engraved on Gough’s tombstone in the Hope Cemetery in Worcester, MA.
194
CONCLUSION
John B. Gough, the Man, the Lecturer, and the Victorian
Scholars who studied Gough have always looked at him with a jaundiced eye. I am perhaps no
exception. After all, it doesn’t take too much digging around for us to surmise that Gough was a
hypocrite, an actor, and a cheat so congruous to our notion of the ostensibly prudish Victorians.
The moral verdict on the man came almost too quickly, in retrospect, to allow an in-depth study
of the lecturer, who had held large audiences spellbound for forty years. There has been a
tendency for us to project modern sensibility and cynicism into the interpretation of his drama
and his popularity – that his titillating moral ambiguity was his main attraction.
This may seem true to us, but definitely not so for a majority of Gough’s vast audience,
the men and women of the evangelical middle and upper middle classes on both sides of the
Atlantic. In private letters and diaries, middle and upper class women, who paid to hear Gough
lecture, confided their adoration and enthusiasm for the lecturer and recommended him to their
friends. 490 They showed the utmost confidence in Gough’s character and consistency. A widow
in Detroit, who had only $200 per annum to live on, willingly gave Gough the one dollar she had
490
These letters and diaries have become digitized and searchable in North American Women's
Letters and Diaries, Colonial to 1950, University of Chicago,
http://solomon.nwld.alexanderstreet.com/. These include, for example, Emeline E. Joslin Colony
to Harriet Hall Johnson, Mar. 22, 1863, Allen-Johnson Family Papers, 1759-1992 (Alexandria,
VA, 2010), 1-4; Elizabeth Payson Prentiss, The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Payson Prentiss
(New York, 1882), journal entry on February 14, 1856; Annie L. Youmans Van Ness, Diary of
Annie L. Van Ness, 1864-1881 (Alexandria, VA, 2004), journal entry on Sunday, April 27, 1873;
Elizabeth Emma Stuart to Kate Stuart Baker (daughter), June 22, 1850, in Stuart Letters of
Robert and Elizabeth Sullivan Stuart and Their Children 1819-1864: With an Undated Letter
Prior to July 21, 1813 (2 vols., New York, 1961). See also Juliet A. Gilmer. Letter to John Baker
Tapscott. 1846, Mar. 31. John B. Tapscott papers. Huntington Library, CA.
195
saved to pay for her laundry and suffered losing her caste by doing the wash on her own. 491 A
mother in Edinburgh gave Gough a handkerchief to wipe his sweat while speaking on the
platform, as he had “wiped away a great many tears (of mothers)” with his lectures. 492 A female
correspondent of the Maine Farmer wrote on receiving word of Gough’s passing that she felt “as
if a personal friend died,” and that although she had never heard Gough’s lectures in person, she
had “seen that lonely (funeral) procession (of his mother’s) over and over” in his
autobiography. 493
It would be presumptuous for us, from the vantage point of history, to think of Gough’s
believers as dupes, or merely as gullible women. For one thing, the most ardent and outspoken
puffers and backers of Gough, as I have shown in the dissertation, were men of the world,
experienced journalists/publicists, reforming ministers, and shrewd merchants. For another, we
may consider ourselves as disenthralled from the Victorian sentimental culture, but we are not
totally immune from the modified form of hero worship today. 494
Gough was such a polarizing figure in his day that it wasn’t for the lack of “exposures”
that he held sway over the respectable Victorians for so long; rather, it was their refusal to
disbelieve. More than once, his defenders contemplated but then quickly dismissed the
491
See Elizabeth Emma Stuart to Kate Stuart Baker (daughter), June 22, 1850, in Stuart Letters
of Robert and Elizabeth Sullivan Stuart and Their Children 1819-1864: With an Undated Letter
Prior to July 21, 1813 (2 vols., New York, 1961).
492
John B. Gough, Autobiography and Personal Recollections Autobiography and Personal
Recollections of John B. Gough (Springfield, MA; Chicago; Philadelphia, 1869), 336-37.
493
“John B. Gough,” Maine Farmer (Augusta, ME), Jun. 3, 1886. Then she made a mistaken
connection between the “lonely procession” and alcohol (Gough never blamed his mother’s
death on his using alcohol, at least not in the book), but this shows exactly how the author’s
control of a text is easily lost in its reception by readers.
494
As the Victorians worshiped Andrew Carnegie, we do today Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs.
196
unthinkable, the grave prospect of his secret drinking or opium-eating. 495 When original sin and
innate depravity had loosened their hold on the popular mind at mid-century, it became
imperative that people had faith in the innate goodness of man. In this light, Gough’s private
character or who the man was on the inside was somewhat irrelevant to his audience’s faith in
him, or to the story I tell. He served, rather, as an entity on whom (or which) his followers
projected their desires and fears (e.g. sincerity and its theatrics, self-making and its competition
with piety, commerce and its role in social reform) and as a focal point of public debate. In a way,
Gough may not have appeared to be the center of my story despite my focus on his public career.
Rather, in different chapters, he has led to (or participated in) the social and cultural
confrontations of different classes of mid-Victorian society (Ch. I); the reassertion of (Liberal
evangelical) reform conservatism as opposed to radical thought and political change (Ch. II); the
ambivalent adoption of dramatic Realism by the evangelical clergy (Ch. III); and the making of a
public celebrity and the emergence of Christian moral entertainment (Ch. IV).
Unlike E. P. Thompson, who credited the Methodists with taming labor for the British
industrial barons, I do not believe that there was a conspiracy behind Gough’s popularity
orchestrated by conservative evangelical merchants and ministers to market hypocrisy. 496 Their
conservative reformist agenda, as advocated by Gough, suggested their contentment and perhaps
mild discomfort with the standing social and moral order. While the dream of (Liberal) free495
For example, see “Vindication of Mr. Gough,” Leeds Mercury, Jun. 22, 1858:
For our won part when we first heard of these charges we felt that if Mr. Gough was in truth
addicted to the use of intoxicating drugs, our faith in human nature must be considerably shaken,
and we should be tempted to regard almost every man we met as an hypocrite. It was absolutely
necessary not only for the sake of Mr. Gough himself, but for the sake of the thousands who in
England and America have regarded him as the apostle of Temperance.
496
E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1963). Thompson was
the son of a Methodist minister, who became a Communist Party member.
197
market capitalism may today seem bankrupt because of two world wars and global financial
crises (or is it?), it seemed at their time to be perfectly just and proper. Gough represented the
majority and the mainstream when he preached and practiced the blending of business and
reform/religion, the balance of self-control (temperance) with self-display, and the justification
of a new faith (“calling”) in work (with profit as a natural outcome) not only as a means of living
but as a way of life (hence the continued accumulation of wealth through incessant work).497
Except for alcohol, however, Gough’s brand of teetotalers did not preach abstemiousness. Gough
was himself an avid consumer. He shopped for fashionable clothes and personal accoutrements
befitting a gentleman, and he bought a country estate and built a mansion for himself, with a nice
cupola, a full library (featuring the largest collection of George Cruikshankiana on this side of
the Atlantic), and later additions of a servant’s quarter, a stable, and a bowling alley.498 All in all,
his inimitable success cannot be considered a singular case of personal hypocrisy, but it was
emblematic of the cultural malaise of a growing consumer democracy.
Owing to his very mainstream-ness, Gough often slipped under the radar for the students
of radical reform movements of the 19th century. He was only recently redeemed from the
oblivion by scholars of theatrical performance and spectacle. In our own haste to see Gough (as
we do our scandal-riddled celebrities and politicians today) as a “familiar” cultural phenomenon,
whose faux pas could only have piqued public curiosity, we are but revamping the attacks on
497
This is what Max Weber termed the “Protestant ethic.” Gough was noted in obituaries and
biographies for having “died in the harness” (he was struck with apoplexy while lecturing in
Philadelphia in 1886). See, Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans.
Talcott Parsons (1930; London and New York, 2010).
498
Remember the gold watch and the watch guard, when he went “missing”! He was booed and
pelted with vegetables by “impudent” Londoners, walking down White Hart Street in London in
his new and fashionable waterproof thigh-high boots. See Gough, Platform Echoes (Hartford,
CT, 1887), 362. The staff at the Boylston Historical Society kindly showed me the Gough house
in the summer of 2010 and informed me about its features and past glory.
198
Victorianism, which dated from the early 20th century (as I have shown in Ch. IV); we have
perhaps become too occupied with the man on the stage to look behind the curtain and find out
who or what was pulling his strings.
199
APPENDIX I
Forgotten Reformers
Deacon Moses Grant (1878-1861), Brattle Street (Unitarian) Church, Boston
The Grants made a fortune after the Revolution in the upholstery business by catering to a
growing appetite for interior décor – especially inexpensive wallpaper. 499 Neither Grant, Jr., nor
his father (also named Moses) received higher education. 500 The father and son joined the
fashionable Brattle Street Church in the late 1780s after quitting the New North Church where
the Grant family had long worshiped. 501 They served successively as deacons of the Brattle
Street Church. In the 1830s, Grant, Jr., decided to retire from the active management of his
paper business and devote full attention to charities and temperance reform. He was president of
the Eye and Ear Infirmary in 1846 and became a subscriber to the Boston Athenaeum in 1850
(His son Moses Pierce followed suit in 1856). Politically, Grant, Jr., was conservative: a Young
Federalist (elected member of the Washington Benevolent Society in 1812) and then a Whig
(elected Alderman from 1848 to 1851). His social work steered clear of radical issues of the day.
He refused to be enlisted in the anti-slavery cause and declined selling paper to William Lloyd
499
Grant’s wallpaper with simple geometric (known as “harlequin”) designs has been found
widely in historic middle-class dwellings in the New England area and beyond. See
http://www.historicnewengland.org/collections-archives-exhibitions/onlineexhibitions/wallpaper/history/Early_American.htm; Moses Grant was listed as one of the richest
men of Massachusetts. See Abner Forbes and J. W. Green, The Richest Men of Massachusetts:
Containing a Statement of the Reputed Wealth of about Fifteen Hundred Persons (Boston, 1845),
30-31.
500
In fact, no Grants had gone to Harvard (a rite of passage for Boston Brahmins) until Moses
Grant, Jr.’s grandson Moses Grant Daniell.
501
His father was a participant in the Boston Tea Party and a possible member of the Sons of
Liberty in Boston. See Benjamin L. Carp, Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party & the
Making of America (New Haven, 2010), Appendix.
200
Garrison’s Liberator for its being an “injurious, if not incendiary sheet.” 502 He was less known
for his culture than for his wealth: he had been too much involved in trade 503 ; he was
remembered as “a man of sound judgment, superior business talents, a practical philanthropist,
and a sincere Christian,” but not as a genteel Brahmin. 504
George Hurlbut (?-1846) and George Clinton Ripley (1812-1895), president and secretary of
the Brooklyn City Temperance Society
The Hurlbuts were natives of New London, CT and were newcomers to New York. 505 George’s
father, Samuel, became a ship owner and a West Indies trader sometime after 1783 in New
London. 506 The real fortune of the family, however, was made in New York City on Southern
502
See William Lloyd Garrison, The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison (6 vols., Boston, 1981), 6:
302.
503
It was not until the third generation (Moses Pierce Grant, son of Moses Grant, Jr.) that they
began to shake off that association. In a private letter to her sister-in-law, Elinor Mead Howells,
wife of William Dean Howells, remarked that “[d]riving out with ladies seems to be his (Moses
P. Grant) occupation in life.” Ginette de B. Merrill and George Arms, ed., If Not Literature:
Letters of Elinor Mead Howells (Columbus, OH, 1988), 105, 133.
504
G. W. Bungay portrays Grant as below average size and unimpressive in appearance, and
“has a singular habit of twitching the muscles of his face and shrugging his shoulders when
excited; often speaks abruptly, when pressed with business, and does not always appear to the
best advantage at first sight, but wears well and ‘improves on acquaintance.’” Bungay, Crayon
Sketches and Off-Hand Takings (Boston, 1852), 93; Rev. William R. Alger of the New North
Church corroborated the roughhewn businessman image in his funeral sermon for Moses Grant,
Jr.: “he [Grant] lacked philosophic thought, and the most advanced freedom of spirit; that the
whole aesthetic side of his nature was meager.” Alger, Good Samaritan in Boston: A Tribute to
Moses Grant (Boston, 1862), 7.
505
George Hurlbut, uncle of George, fought and died in the Revolution. John Hurlbut, also uncle
of George (cousin of his father) was elected to the local Committee of Correspondence. Samuel
Hurlbut, George’s father, too young to have taken part in the fighting, was said to have served in
the US Navy as a midshipman. Henry Higgins Hurlbut, The Hurlbut Genealogy (Albany, NY,
1888), 95-97.
506
Joseph Hurlbut, George’s uncle, died in a shipwreck in the West Indies in 1795. Frances
Manwaring Caulkins, History of New London, Connecticut (New London, CT, 1895), 582.
201
cotton. George was one of the three Hurlbut brothers (Elisha Denison and John Denison) who
owned the large New York-based shipping firm of E. D. Hurlbut & Co., which plied the Gulf
coast and later ran packet lines to major European ports. The brothers married into New York
and Brooklyn local families, 507 but had not broken into the inner circles of the Knickerbocker
elite (who survived the Revolution more or less intact, unlike their Boston counterpart). They
supported the Seamen’s Friends Society and the Home Missionary and Tract Society, but were
not involved with the anti-slavery circles of Arthur and Lewis Tappan or any other radical
reform society. George Hurlbut was remembered, in particular, for his social conservatism:
His views of right and wrong were discriminating and decided… He could tolerate none of
the radical views which are becoming so fashionable at the present day… He gave no
countenance to notions or practices, which disorganize society, which corrupt youth, which
lessen respect for the laws, or which rob law of its just penalty, either in its letter or its
administration. Although a young man…he lent no sanction to measures or views subversive
of good order, or which in a spirit of innovation or vainglorying, aim to break up the
foundations of many generations… 508
George Clinton Ripley came from Oakham, MA and moved with his wife to Brooklyn from
Boston in 1841. He had a long career clerking with the New York dry goods firm, Holbrook,
Nelson, & Co. before going into the life insurance business in 1861. He became an officer and
later the president of the Brooklyn-based Home Life Insurance Company. He was a founder of
the Philharmonic Society of Brooklyn and president of the Long Island Historical Society and
507
Edwina Hicks Hurlbut, wife of John Denison, was daughter of Jacob M. Hicks, a “gentleman”
(albeit known for his spitting) and owner of a good portion of land on Brooklyn Heights. Martha
Purser Hulrbut, wife of Elisha Denison, was daughter of George H. Purser of New York
(apparently not George H. Purser of the Tweed Ring). And Sarah Louisa Lewis Hurlbut, wife of
George, was the sister of Rev. William B. Lewis, minister of the Third Presbyterian Church of
Brooklyn, where George was member and trustee.
508
In George Hurlbut’s funeral sermon, Rev. Wm. Beale Lewis, Hurlbut’s brother-in-law,
praised him for his social and political conservatism. Lewis, Christ Would Have His People
Where He Is: A Sermon, Preached in the Third Presbyterian Church, Brooklyn, NY (New York,
1846), 26-27.
202
Museum. 509 The Ripleys and the Hurlbut brothers lived in the same neighborhood (the
fashionable Brooklyn Heights), went to the same church (Presbyterian), and supported the same
kind of ameliorative and order-preserving reform, and they were all members of the Brooklyn
New England Society. They knew each other well (Ripley named his son George Hurlbut), and
had close social and business ties with other Yankees in New York. 510
Jesse W. Goodrich (?-1857), editor of the Massachusetts Cataract and Worcester County
Waterfall, Worcester, MA
Goodrich was a native of Pittsfield, MA and was known to be one of Gough’s early friends and
an instrument in Gough’s reformation. Goodrich was a lawyer and a hard-dealing businessman.
Once the president and trustee of the Kennebec Lumber Company, an unincorporated joint stock
company speculating in Maine land, he ran afoul of the stockholders during the financial crisis of
1837 for defaulting in interest payment and was sued for taking out unauthorized notes and
mortgages on company-owned land (whether he benefited personally from the dubious
transactions or not, we do not know). 511 In the early 1840s, however, he began to switch focus to
the temperance enterprise. He served as the president of the Worcester Washingtonian Society
509
Elsie Ripley Clapp, granddaughter of George Ripley, remembered him fondly, many years
after he died, as a supporter of the Underground Railroad and the anti-slavery movement, but this
cannot be verified. Sam Stack, Elsie Ripley Clapp: Her Life and the Community School (New
York, 2004), 11.
510
Brooklyn (NY) Daily Eagle, Dec. 28, 1846.
511
Jesse Goodrich Papers in Miscellaneous Manuscripts, American Antiquarian Society; Daily
Atlas, Mar. 22, 1842, “Supreme Judicial Court of the Worcester County.”
203
and edited the society’s weekly journal, the Cataract, which under him became the voice of the
legal suasion faction within the temperance community in Worcester. 512
Benjamin Webb Williams (1816-1905), owner (after 1869) of the Williams Lecture and
Musical Bureau, Taunton, MA
Born in Salem, MA, Williams was the editor of the Taunton (MA) Dew Drop and a temperance
firebrand. He was sued for libel (and subsequently acquitted) in 1845 for publishing a story
impugning the character of a grocer in Taunton, who allegedly sold liquor with no license. 513
Williams was one of Gough’s early employers and would later become the founder and manager
of the Williams Lecture and Musical Bureau. He was actively involved in the no-license
campaign and the agitation for passing a “Maine Law” in Massachusetts.514
Rev. John Marsh, editor of the New-York-City-based Journal of the American Temperance
Union (JATU), was a native of Wethersfield, CT and was trained for the ministry at Yale under
Timothy Dwight. He was the long-time secretary of the American Temperance Union and he
was responsible for bringing Gough to New York City and for organizing the lecturer’s first tour
of upstate New York in 1844. The JATU tried to recapture the direction of the temperance
movement in the 1840s and channel the energy of the popular temperance movement toward a
legislative campaign to end liquor licensing. It was to turn against Gough in the late 1850s at the
time of the Gough v. Lees trial.
512
He published by subscription his phrenological chart and description as a matchmaking tool.
His will, the execution of which was predicated on the beneficiaries’ teetotalism, was later
invalidated by his relatives in court.
513
B. W. Williams, Report on the Trial of B. W. Williams and Others (Taunton, MA, 1846). The
court decision was a complete reversal of the Commonwealth v. Cheever (1835).
514
Alfred A. Wright, Who’s Who in Lyceum (Philadelphia, 1906), 28-29. Williams paid Gough
$8 per lecture in 1842.
204
APPENDIX II
Friends and Foes, 1845-46
GOUGH SUPPORTERS IN AND AROUND PHILADELPHIA 515 :
New-School Presbyterians
Rev. Theodore L. Cuyler, Corresponding Secretary of the Philadelphia Bible Society
Rev. Ezra S. Ely, First Presbyterian (North Liberty)
Rev. Mr. Robert Adair, First - (Southwark)
Rev. Mr. Willis Lord, Seventh Rev. Mr. Wm. Ramsey, Twelfth Rev. Elias J. Richards, Western Rev. Joel Parker, Clinton Street Rev. M. LaRue P. Thompson, Fifth Rev. John L. Grant, Eleventh Rev. Mr. Wylie could be First Reformed, Rev. Samuel B. Wylie or Rev. T. W. J. Wylie or
Reformed, S. O. Wylie
Rev. Jos. T. Cooper, Second Associate
Rev. Amasa Converse, Editor of Christian Observer
Episcopalian
Rev. Mr. Richard Newton, St. Paul’s
Rev. Mr. J. M. Douglass, St. Matthew’s
Baptist
Rev. Mr. Geo. Higgins, Second (Southwark)
Rev. Abraham D. Gillett, Eleventh
Rev. Mr. Geo. B. Ide, First
Independent/Mission
515
Names compiled from News Clippings Folio Vol. 2 (ca. 1845-48), Gough Papers, AAS;
Occupational and denominational information was obtained from McElroy’s Philadelphia
Directory (Philadelphia, 1845-1847) and relevant census data.
205
Rev. John Chambers, First Independent
Rev. Henry D. Moore, missionary at the Christian Home Missionary Society of the City and
County of Philadelphia and freelance writer
Rev. M. E. Cross of the Congregational Church in Darby, PA
Rev. W. C. Howard, Member for life of the American Bible Society
Rev. Mr. Burroughs, Baptist Home Mission
Non-Clergy
P. S. White (Philip S.) attorney, 419 Coates
Judge Bouvier (John Bouvier), office 23 S 7th, h. 433 Sassafras
Professor Gibson (Wm. Gibson, M.D., NW Sch 7th & Chestnut, taught surgery at UPenn
Wm. J. Mullen, surgeon dentist and Maine Law advocate, 181 Pine
Col. Robinson (Thomas Robinson) gentleman, 17 Palmyra sq.
John Ely. Gent., SE 10th & Spruce
Henry Gibbons, M. D. 167 S 3rd
Geo. Washington Reed, watchmaker, NW 2nd & Vine, h. 50 Vine
Geo. W. Allen, M. D., 45 N 8th and 28 S 6th, h. 77 Wood.
Florence Thomas B., Sec'ry. Comptrollers public schools, 11 state house, h 48 Lombard
Hon. Edward A. Penniman, banker, involved in the bank war (currency war) against British and
other foreign banks in 1837-8 (See Niles Weekly Register, Vol. 52, pp. 197-8)
Matthias, Benj., gentleman, 352 Vine
Smith, Wade T., merchant, 160 High, h. 3 W Penn Square
Col. W. P. Smith, involved in the petition for Congress to pass laws to relieve the monetary
embarrassment of Pennsylvania, 1834.
W. Wilson (likely) Wm. Wilson, mer., 14 S 6th, h Spruce ab 7th
Edwin Booth, mer., 78 High, h 199 N 9th
Sprogell Marshall, atty. and coun. 188 S 9th
Geo. H. Burgin, M.D. on board of controllers for City of Philadelphia 1844-5
Wm. Sloanaker, publisher, NE 3rd & Dock, h. 135 N 12th
Sloanaker Wm. & Co. pub’s Daily Sun, NE 3rd & Dock.
Judge Todd, (James), Attorney General of Fayette County
206
John Bouvier, Recorder of Philadelphia
Todd James, att'y & coun., 152 'Walnut, h 276 Callowhill
Todd David S., att'y & coun., 152 Walnut, h 149 Button wood
James Todd, president of the Citizen’s Mutual Insurance Company of Penn., Office 152 Walnut
street.
Moore John D. dentist, 133 Spruce
M. A. Root, Root & Collins, photog-raphists, 140 Chestnut; and teacher of writing, 140 Chestnut,
h Sch 8th bel George
Barrett C. B., printer, 33 Carter's alley, h 57 Franklin
Clarke Thomas C, editor of Saturday Museum, 56 S 12th
M'Calla William, collector, 5 N 11th
Women (of the Ladies’ Temperance Union of the City and County of Philadelphia)
Mrs. S. Collins, Cynthia Painter Collins, wife of Simeon Collins, bookseller, mother of Frances
Amelia Collins, corresponding secretary of the Ladies Temperance Union
Mrs. Dr. Bryan, Elizabeth L, wife of James Bryan, physician
Miss Sarah H. McCalla/M’Calla, (very likely) related to William M’Calla, erstwhile com.
merchant, 1845-55 collector of tobacco revenue
Miss Mary Ann Rhoads/Rhodes, sister-in-law of Edwin Booth, broker.
S. M’Cawley, unknown connections
Harriet Probasco, printer, editor of American Women
207
ANTI-GOUGHERS IN NEW YORK 516 :
Brewster W. Platt, no information found
John B. Nelson, (perhaps) engineer, 46 Leonard
Salmon Bronson, Thomsonian physician, 94 W. Broadway
W. M. Judson, ship carpenter
Richard W. Waddy, shoemaker, 123 Walker, h. do.
H. T. Sammons, cartman
Thomas Farley, (likely) moulder
Francis D. Allen, Jr., seller of temperance books, Franklin Bookstore
J. Pitcher, no information found
John Reilly, (likely) rigger
Alphonso Figsbee, printer, 20 Madison
Francis J. Hedenberg, tinsmith, 79 Division, h. 79 do
Wm. H. Wanmaker, marble cutter
Henry McGaviston, no information found
James H. St. John, (likely) machinist
P(eter) J. Powless, ship carpenter, 307 Washington
Wm. P. Egbert, hatter, 104 Laurens
Adam C. Flanagan, president of the Prospect Temperance Society; printer, 142 Delancy
John E. Munson, (likely) bookbinder
Wm. H. Lines, (likely) boardinghouse, 336 pearl
J. Foster, too common a name
James Stockwell, keeper of the Croton Lunch, a temperance restaurant
Levi Burr, printer
William Allen, (likely) ship carpenter
Abrahma A. Bertran, no information found
Edward M. Osborn, (likely) clerk, 39 Rose
Solomon Dean, Jr., tinsmith
516
This is based on New York True Sun, Jan. 20, 27, 28, 29, 1846, Doggett’s New-York City
Directory for 1845 (New York, 1845), and relevant census data. A good indication of the antiGoughers’ lower socio-economic status is the difficulty of locating information about them.
208
Isaac C. Bennett, (house)painter, r. 48 First
Joseph K. Barr, printer, rear 13 Forsyth
James Mason, too common a name
Jesse Thomas, (likely) carpenter
Stephen Munson, (likely) carpenter
James Chamber, shipmaster, 131 Lewis
C. J. Russell, no information found
James Kaighin, no information found
Samuel Feeks, no information found
Albert Vanderhoof, sailmaker, 72 Eldridge
Charles L. Curtis, carpenter
William B. Burrill, undertaker or hardware (?)
Joseph Murphy, too common a name
A. D. Wilson, president of the Marshall T. A. society, homeopathy physician, 42 Walker
Joseph Manning, silversmith, 291 Pearl
Henry Aked, bookbinder
Alexander Bains, no information found
James Welch, (likely) carpenter
Robert M. Van Dike, marble carver
Charles Falconi, no information found
A(mos). J. Williamson, printer
Francis McIlvain, unclear
Wm. Savage, (likely) bookbinder, 81 Watts
Monroe Tompkins, no information found
James Baker, (likely) shoemaker
Wm. B. Patterson, no information found
Wm. Kelly, too common a name
James Dalyoil(?), no information found
Wm. Hart, printer
Wm. Alley, no information found
Samuel Frellors, no information found
209
Joseph Medmore, no information found
Timothy Van Dike, no information found
Thomas G. Mead, bookbinder
Wm. M. Davis, bookbinder, 89 Clinton
Peter McDonald, president of Total Abstinence Caledonian B. Society (Rechabite), printer 517
Total number: 63
Carpenters: 7; Printers: 7; Bookbinders: 5;
517
The wives of Peter McDonald and James Stockwell were involved in organizing a female
auxiliary society for the T.A. Caledonian B. Society. See Crystal Fount and Rechabite Recorder
(New York), Nov. 29, 1845.
210
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